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One of the four hostages released by Hamas Tuesday described the “hell” of being abducted from her kibbutz near Gaza, and that she was taken through a network of tunnels that “looked like lots and lots of spiderwebs.”
There are still around 220 hostages being held by Hamas after the group launched an unprecedented attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Israel’s military said, and efforts continued to negotiate for their release.
Talks among Hamas, the Qataris and the Israelis, with U.S. involvement, were continuing.
“Talks are now underway for the release of a larger group. There has not been a break down. They are progressing positively,” a diplomat with knowledge of the talks said, noting there has been “no breakthrough yet.”
Meanwhile, Israeli forces remain on the ground outside Gaza but no large-scale ground offensive into the densely populated area has been announced by Israel’s military.
Complicating matters, according to a senior government official, is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not settled on an exit plan for how and when Israeli ground forces will leave Gaza. Meetings have so far focused primarily on day-to-day military operations.
At the United Nations, Israeli officials had a furious reaction after U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a speech that Hamas’ attack “did not happen in a vacuum.”
“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation” by the Israeli government, Guterres said. “They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced, and their homes demolished.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and Israel’s permanent U.N. representative, Gilad Erdan, demanded Guterres resign.
Guterres has condemned Hamas’ attack on Israel and said that nothing can justify it.
Aid organizations and health officials in Gaza say the health system there is collapsing. Six hospitals have shut down across Gaza due to a lack of fuel, the World Health Organization said, and other facilities have been closed due to damage from the war.
DEARBORN, Mich. — Adam Abusalah worked on President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign in the key state of Michigan, but now the Palestinian American says the president has let him and others down.
“Right now, I have family in Palestine who’s afraid for their lives — and Biden is doing nothing to stop it,” Abusalah told NBC News.
“I’m hurt by the betrayal that we feel from Biden, but I also feel a little bit of guilt for what I’ve done,” he said.
Today the Council on American-Islamic Relations, known as CAIR, called on Biden to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, saying his administration’s refusal to do so is “unacceptable.”
“It’s not only disrespect. Disregard for our lives,” Osama Siblani, the publisher of The Arab American News newspaper, said in an interview.
The World Health Organization and others have called for a humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza. Israel has vowed to crush Hamas after Hamas terrorist attacks on the country, and it has been hitting Gaza with airstrikes.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said today at a White House briefing that “we believe that a cease-fire right now is only going to benefit Hamas.”
Syria blames Western countries for bloodshed
Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, Al Haka Dindi, blamed Western nations for civilian casualties in Gaza as Israel conducts airstrikes in retaliation for Hamas’ unprecedented terrorist attack on Israel.
“These massacres were not to happen if not for the insistence of some Western countries to give a carte blanche to Israel, which they call the right to self-defense,” he said at a Security Council meeting.
The Syrian Arab Republic is headed by Bashar al-Assad, whose military has been accused of war crimes.
Syria’s air force carried out chemical weapons attacks using sarin and chlorine on the town of Latamneh in 2017, the international chemical weapons watchdog the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapon has said. Assad has denied using chemical weapons.
IDF says it struck Syrian targets after rocket launches toward Israel
Israel’s military said Wednesday local time that it struck “military infrastructure and mortar launchers belonging to the Syrian Army.”
The Israel Defense Forces said on X that it carried out the strikes after rockets were launched from Syria toward Israel.
The IDF said Tuesday that two launches from Syria fell in an open field and that artillery responded.
Agony and grief fill the halls of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, with wounded in the hallways.
“Forty percent of all of the wounded are children,” Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah said.
Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza has a bed occupancy of around 150%, according to the World Health Organization, which warns patients could die unless Gaza gets badly needed fuel.
Six hospitals across the Gaza Strip have already shut down because of lack of fuel, the WHO said.
“Unless vital fuel and additional health supplies are urgently delivered into Gaza, thousands of vulnerable patients risk death or medical complications as critical services shut down due to lack of power,” it said.
Abu-Sittah said the hospital has received 600 dead and three times that many wounded over the past 24 hours.
“This has been putting even more pressure on the system that’s falling apart,” he said.
Israel has been launching airstrikes against Hamas in Gaza since Hamas launched terrorist attacks against Israel. Israel’s military says that Hamas conceals itself in civilian areas and uses civilians as shields and that it is striking against Hamas.
Al-Shifa hospital supplies are dwindling. “We’re running out of everything from simple dressings to complex burn dressings,” Abu-Sittah said. The hospital has over 150 people on ventilators in intensive care.
Abu-Sittah said that another hospital in northern Gaza ran out of fuel and that the facility is using a much smaller generator just to power the operating room.
“Any minute now, this is going to happen to Shifa Hospital here,” he said.
Gaza Ministry of Health report describes crumbling health system
A "daily emergency report" created by Gaza's Hamas-run Health Ministry described an emergency medicine system that's on the edge of failure.
According to the figures in the document, which could not be independently verified, 57 medical workers in the system had been killed, 25 ambulances had been taken out of service, and 15,273 people had been injured in the conflict.
The document, provided to NBC News by Dr. Medhat Abbas, a director at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, included detailed charts and figures that describe overcrowded hospitals' struggling with dwindling resources.
Dated Sunday, the document says it "reflects a daily summary of work progress in the Ministry of Health for 24 hours."
Of nine government hospitals, four are at capacity, and three have taken in more patients than there are beds, according to the report. Al-Shifa was reported to be at 147% capacity. In a voice memo, Abbas said operations were being performed in the hallways with no anesthesia because of the crowding.
According to the report, "12 hospitals and 32 health care centers are out of service because of lack of fuel or bombed."
There's concern for 68 babies on ventilators, considering the potential need to evacuate hospitals, according to the report.
There's also a critical shortage of Type O blood in the system, along with lab equipment and supplies, and the hospitals "want to appeal to international organizations and institutions to provide blood units from outside Gaza," the report said.
Hospitals in Gaza, already at a breaking point, could be forced to close and endanger the lives of many critically ill patients, health officials said today.
The United Nations relief agency UNRWA warned today that it will run out of fuel in two days, which would put the delivery of aid at risk.
In northern Gaza, the Indonesian Hospital was forced to shut down critical services because of the lack of fuel, the World Health Organization said.
“The Turkish Friendship Hospital, the only oncology hospital in the Gaza Strip, remains partially functional due to lack of fuel, putting around 2000 cancer patients at risk,” the WHO said.
Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said today that “fuel will not enter Gaza as long as it ends up in the hands of Hamas.”
The WHO warned, "Unless vital fuel and additional health supplies are urgently delivered into Gaza, thousands of vulnerable patients risk death or medical complications as critical services shut down due to lack of power."
U.S. intel: Gaza hospital blast caused by Palestinian rocket that broke apart due to engine failure
U.S. spy agencies believe that the blast at a Gaza hospital a week ago was caused by a Palestinian rocket that suffered engine failure and broke apart into two pieces, with the warhead striking the hospital’s compound, intelligence officials said Tuesday.
Speaking to reporters by phone, the U.S. intelligence officials said they had “high confidence” in their assessment that it was not Israel that fired the rocket, but they were less certain which Palestinian militants fired the projectile on the evening of Oct. 17.
“We assess with high confidence that Israel was not responsible for the explosion at the hospital and that Palestinian militants were responsible,” an intelligence official said. “We assess with low confidence that Palestine Islamic Jihad was responsible for launching the rocket that landed on the hospital.”
U.S. officials had indicated that Palestine Islamic Jihad was most likely responsible, and Israel blamed the group for the blast. The militant group shares Hamas’ goal of destroying Israel, but it is smaller than Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip.
The evidence pointing to PIJ was based on intercepted conversations between suspected “Hamas affiliated militants” who appeared to be speculating about who was behind the rocket launch, the officials said.
”We can’t confirm who they are. We can’t confirm that what they are discussing in the intercept actually took place,” the official said. The audio was not the same as that released publicly by Israel’s military previously, and it was vetted and deemed authentic, the official said.
Intelligence officials said they did not have an estimate of the casualties caused by the blast. “We don’t have any independent ability to verify the specific casualty count in Gaza,” the official said.
There was no evidence that Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system shot the rocket down, officials said.
Residents in Khan Younis in southern Gaza were seen in video carrying people from a building that at least partly collapsed after it was struck by an explosion.
“There is no safety anywhere,” said a man recorded on video. He said that they were displaced and that they went there because they were told it was safe. Israel’s military has been telling people to leave northern Gaza, which includes Gaza City, as it conducts strikes on what it says are Hamas targets.
NSC spokesman Kirby: Cease-fire right now benefits only Hamas
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said today that “a cease-fire right now really only benefits Hamas.”
Kirby, responding to a question at a White House news briefing, said that Israel will make the decision whether to attack by ground but that combat between Israel and Hamas is already happening.
“We believe that a cease-fire right now is only going to benefit Hamas,” said Kirby, the NSC’s coordinator for strategic communications.
“We’re going to continue to make sure Israel has the tools and the capabilities that they need to defend themselves,” Kirby said. “We’re going to continue to try and get that humanitarian assistance in, and we’re going to continue to try and get hostages and people out of Gaza appropriately.”
Kirby said that at the Rafah crossing from Gaza into Egypt, “there are many” American citizens who want to leave Gaza.
U.S. Special Envoy David Satterfield is talking with Egypt and other partners about the possibility of other civilians’ leaving, as well.
Kirby said: “Again: innocent civilians, of many different nationalities, certainly Palestinians, that want to leave and should be allowed to leave an active war zone for their own safety and the safety of their families.”
IDF says it targeted ‘cell of divers’ trying to enter Israel by sea
Israel’s military said today that its naval forces targeted a “cell of divers” that tried to enter Israel from the sea from Gaza.
The IDF says that the divers were from Hamas and that they tried to enter the area of Zikim, which is near the Mediterranean coast north of Gaza.
“IDF fighter jets struck the military compound from which the terrorists departed in the Gaza Strip,” the military said in a statement.
The IDF said on X that it struck a tunnel that was used, as well as a weapons warehouse in Gaza.