Extract from ABC News
The Palestinian death toll from the war between Israel and Gaza has soared past 25,000, the health ministry in the Gaza Strip said on Sunday, while the Israeli government appeared far from achieving its goals of crushing the militant group and freeing more than 100 hostages.
Key points:
- The IDF continues to carry out air strikes on the Gaza Strip, as Israelis grow increasingly divided over the conflict
- The UN secretary-general has condemned Israel for the soaring number of civilian deaths in the territory
- Israel has approved a plan for frozen tax funds earmarked for the Gaza Strip to be held by Norway
The level of death, destruction and displacement from the war is already without precedent in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yet Israeli officials say the fighting is likely to continue for several more months.
The slow progress and the plight of the hostages held in Gaza has divided ordinary Israelis and their leaders, even as the offensive threatens to ignite a wider war involving Iran-backed groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen that support the Palestinians.
The United States, which has provided essential diplomatic and military support for the offensive, has had limited success in persuading Israel to adopt military tactics that put civilians at less risk and to facilitate the delivery of more humanitarian aid.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also rejected US and international calls for postwar plans that would include a path to Palestinian statehood.
Gaza death toll climbs amid blistering offensive
The war began with Hamas's surprise terror attack in southern Israel on October 7, during which Palestinian militants killed about 1,200 people, many of them civilians, and took around 250 hostages back to Gaza.
The attack, in which many women and children were killed and bodies were mutilated, drew worldwide revulsion and condemnation.
Israel responded with a blistering three-week air campaign and then a ground invasion into northern Gaza that laid waste to entire neighbourhoods.
Ground operations are now focused on the southern city of Khan Younis and built-up refugee camps in central Gaza dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation.
Israel continues to carry out air strikes throughout the besieged territory, including areas in the south where it told civilians to seek refuge. Many Palestinians have ignored evacuation orders, saying nowhere feels safe.
Since the war started, a total of 25,105 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, while another 62,681 have been wounded, the health ministry reported on Sunday.
The death toll included 178 bodies brought to Gaza's hospitals since Saturday, ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qidra said. Another 300 people were wounded in the past day, he said.
The overall toll is thought to be even higher than that number, because many casualties remain buried under the rubble from Israeli strikes or in areas where medics cannot reach them, he added.
Gaza's health ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its figures, but says around two-thirds of the people killed in Gaza have been women or children.
The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government, but its casualty figures from previous wars have been largely consistent with those of UN agencies and even the Israeli military.
Israel's military says it has killed around 9,000 militants, and blames the high civilian death toll on Hamas because it positions fighters, tunnels and other militant infrastructure in dense neighbourhoods, often near homes, schools or mosques.
The military says 195 of its soldiers have been killed since the start of the Gaza offensive.
The war has displaced some 85 per cent of Gaza's residents from their homes, with hundreds of thousands packing into United Nations-run shelters and tent camps in the southern part of the tiny coastal enclave.
UN officials say a quarter of the population of 2.3 million is starving, as only a trickle of humanitarian aid reaches them because of the fighting and Israeli restrictions.
Hamas defends October 7 attack
Hamas on Sunday defended its October 7 attacks on Israel but admitted to "faults" and called for an end to "Israeli aggression" in Gaza.
In its first public report on the attacks that began the war, Hamas said they were a "necessary step" against Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, and a way to secure release of Palestinian prisoners.
Mr Netanyahu later vowed "complete victory" and said his government would not accept Hamas' conditions for releasing hostages still held in Gaza.
"In exchange for the release of our hostages, Hamas demands an end to the war, the withdrawal of our forces from Gaza, the release of all murderers ... If we accept this, our soldiers have fallen in vain. If we accept this, we won't be able to guarantee the safety of our citizens," Mr Netanyahu said.
"I reject outright the terms of surrender of the monsters of Hamas," he said.
Hamas' 16-page report admitted "some faults happened … due to the rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system, and the chaos caused along the border areas with Gaza".
The report did not make clear why it was issued now, more than three months into the war that began when militants broke through Gaza's militarised border to attack Israelis and foreigners in the streets, in their homes and at an outdoor rave party.
Israelis increasingly divided
Mr Netanyahu has vowed to keep up the offensive until Israel achieves "complete victory" over Hamas and rescues all remaining hostages — but even some top Israeli officials have begun to acknowledge that those goals might be mutually exclusive.
Hamas is believed to be holding the captives in tunnels deep underground and using them as shields for its top leaders.
Israel has only managed to rescue one hostage since the war began, and Hamas says several have been killed in Israeli air strikes or during failed rescue operations.
A member of Israel's war cabinet, former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, said last week that the only way to free the remaining hostages was through a ceasefire.
In an implicit criticism of Mr Netanyahu, he said claims to the contrary amounted to "illusions".
Hamas has said it will not free any more hostages until Israel ends its offensive.
The group is also expected to make any further releases conditional on securing freedom for thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, including high-profile militants involved in attacks that killed Israelis.
Israel's government has ruled that out for now, but it faces rising pressure from families of the hostages, who are pushing for another exchange, and from Israelis frustrated by the security failures that preceded the October 7 attack and by Mr Netanyahu's handling of the war.
Thousands of people gathered in Tel Aviv over the weekend to call for new elections.
Mr Netanyahu's far-right coalition partners are meanwhile pushing him to step up the offensive, with some calling for the "voluntary" emigration of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza and the re-establishment of Jewish settlements there.
Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers from the territory in 2005, two years before Hamas seized power from rival Palestinian forces.
UN secretary-general condemns civilian deaths
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Sunday denounced Israel for the "heartbreaking" deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Speaking at the opening of a summit of the G77+China in the Ugandan capital Kampala, Mr Guterres said the IDF's military operation had "spread mass destruction and killed civilians on a scale unprecedented during my time as secretary-general".
"This is heartbreaking and utterly unacceptable. The Middle East is a tinder-box; we must do all we can to prevent conflict from igniting across the region," he said.
He added that the refusal to accept the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians was totally unacceptable, and said denying Palestinians the right to statehood "would indefinitely prolong a conflict that has become a major threat to global peace and security".
Mr Guterres's remarks came after Mr Netanyahu appeared on Saturday to push back against US President Joe Biden's remarks about Palestinian statehood after the war against Hamas ends.
His office said that in talks on Friday with Mr Biden, Mr Netanyahu "reiterated his policy that after Hamas is destroyed Israel must retain security control over Gaza to ensure that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel, a requirement that contradicts the demand for Palestinian sovereignty".
Mr Guterres was in Kampala to attend the summits of G77+China, a group of developing countries that champion the common interests of countries from the global south, and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).
Leaders and senior officials from dozens of countries including South Africa, Iran, China, Turkey, Cuba, India, Vietnam and others attended the meetings.
A document released late Saturday at the end of the NAM summit included a condemnation of "the illegal Israeli military aggression on the Gaza Strip, the indiscriminate attacks against Palestinian civilians, civilian objects, the forced displacement of the Palestinian population" and called for an immediate and durable humanitarian ceasefire.
Israel approves plan for Gaza tax funds to be held by Norway
Also on Sunday, Israel's cabinet approved a plan for frozen tax funds earmarked for the Hamas-run Gaza Strip to be held by Norway instead of being transferred to the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Under interim peace accords reached in the 1990s, Israel's finance ministry collects tax on behalf of the Palestinians and makes monthly transfers to the Western-backed PA, which exercises limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
But there have been constant wrangles over the arrangement, including Israel's demand that the funds do not reach Hamas, which it, along with most of the West, deems a terrorist group.
Despite Hamas seizing control of Gaza from the Western-backed PA in 2007 after a brief civil war, many PA public sector employees in Gaza kept their jobs and continued to be paid with transferred tax revenues.
Mr Netanyahu said the cabinet decision on the tax funds was supported by Norway and the United States, which will be a guarantor that the framework holds.
His office said the money, or any equivalent, would not be transferred "in any situation, except with the approval of the Israeli finance minister, and also not through a third party".
The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), an umbrella group of Palestinian groups that includes Fatah, which controls the PA, said on Sunday it wanted the money in full, and would not accept conditions that prevent it from paying its staff, including in Gaza.
"Any deductions from our financial rights or any conditions imposed by Israel that prevent the PA from paying our people in the Gaza Strip are rejected by us," said Hussein Al-Sheikh, secretary-general of the PLO's executive committee.
A spokesman for Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who heads a far-right, pro-settlement party, confirmed that Norway would hold the funds under the arrangement.
"Not one shekel will go to Gaza," said Mr Smotrich, who has long been opposed to transferring funds to the PA.
AP/Reuters
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