Closing summary
It’s 2.15am in Gaza City and Tel Aviv and we’ll close this blog shortly. Our live coverage will resume later today. Here’s a recap of the latest developments:
The Israeli military said it had expanded its ground offensive in the Gaza Strip to refugee camps in the central part of the Palestinian territory. Israeli forces continued to bombard the densely populated Nuseirat, Maghazi and Bureij refugee camps in central Gaza for a fourth day on Tuesday. The World Health Organisation emergency medical teams coordinator, Sean Casey, said “100-plus patients” had been brought into al-Aqsa hospital in the space of 30 minutes on Monday, adding that “about 100” more lifeless bodies were brought into the hospital around the same time.
Israel is engaged in a “multi-front war”, its defence minister Yoav Gallant, has said, hinting at military operations across the Middle East as the war in Gaza showed new signs of a dangerous regional escalation. Speaking in parliament on Tuesday, Gallant said Israel was “coming under attack from seven theatres: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Judea and Samaria [an Israeli term for the West Bank], Iraq, Yemen and Iran”.
Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza will probably go on for many months, the country’s military chief has said. Herzi Halevi, the Israel Defence Forces’ chief of staff, said on Tuesday that its forces would reach the Hamas leadership “whether it takes a week or whether it takes months”.
Nearly 21,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said on Tuesday. The latest figures say 20,915 people have been killed and 54,918 injured, including 241 Palestinians who were killed in the past 24 hours and 382 injured.
Israeli forces killed two Palestinian people in a raid on a refugee camp near the occupied West Bank city of Hebron on Tuesday, the Palestinian health ministry has said. The two people – aged 17 and 31 – were shot dead in the Fawwar refugee camp, south of Hebron, the ministry said.
All telecommunications and Internet services have been lost in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian phone service provider, Paltel, said on Tuesday. In a social media post, it said its services had experienced a “complete breakdown” that was “due to the ongoing offensive”.
The United Nations is “gravely concerned” about the “continued bombardment” of central Gaza by Israeli forces, a UN human rights office spokesperson has said. In a statement, Seif Magango urged Israeli forces to take all measures available to protect civilians and that attacks must adhere to the principles of humanitarian international law.
The Israel Defence Forces said nine of its soldiers were wounded in an anti-tank missile fired by Lebanon’s Hezbollah group on Tuesday. The IDF soldiers were evacuating a civilian who had been injured in an earlier Hezbollah attack on a church, the army said. One of the soldiers was in a “serious condition”, it said. Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari accused Hezbollah of “committing war crimes by indiscriminately attacking places of worship”.
Sigrid Kaag, the Dutch former deputy prime minister and a Middle East expert, has been appointed the United Nations’ coordinator for humanitarian aid to Gaza. The announcement by the UN secretary general, António Guterres, follows last week’s security council resolution calling for aid to be delivered to the territory “at scale”. The US welcomed Kaag’s appointment. She is expected to start on 8 January.
Yemen’s Houthi rebel group has said it carried out drone attacks targeting the Israeli port city of Eilat, as well as a commercial vessel in the Red Sea. A Houthi military spokesperson said the group launched an attack with missiles on a MSC United commercial ship in the Red Sea after it rejected three warning calls, as well as drone attacks on the southern Israeli city of Eilat “and other areas in occupied Palestine”.
US Central Command said the US had downed 12 drones, three anti-ship ballistic missiles and two land attack cruise missiles fired by Houthis in the southern Red Sea.
The Israeli army has said it arrested senior Palestinian politician Khalida Jarrar in the occupied West Bank, along with other activists of her party. Jarrar, a prominent figure in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), had been previously arrested by Israeli forces in October 2019 and released in September the following year, after being held without trial.
A blast occurred near the Israeli embassy in New Delhi on Tuesday, authorities said. No staff members were wounded or killed in the incident, authorities said, adding that investigations into its cause were ongoing. Israel urged its citizens in India, specifically in New Delhi, to exercise caution.
Israel will no longer grant automatic visas to UN employees, after accusing the global body of being “complicit partners” in Hamas’s tactics. The move comes after Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, said on Monday that he had instructed his ministry not to renew the visa of a UN staff member in Israel.
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The United States has welcomed the appointment Sigrid Kaag of the Netherlands as the UN coordinator for humanitarian aid to Gaza.
State department spokesman Matthew Miller said on X (formerly Twitter) that the US looked forward to working closely with Kaag “to accelerate and streamline provision of live-saving humanitarian relief” to Palestinian civilians in the territory.
We welcome today’s @UN appointment of Sigrid Kaag as Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza. We look forward to working closely with her and @UNOPS to accelerate and streamline provision of live-saving humanitarian relief to Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
— Matthew Miller (@StateDeptSpox) December 26, 2023
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