Israeli troops have been preparing for a ground assault into Gaza that could start at any moment. An advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CBS News that civilian casualties are inevitable. Tony Dokoupil will have more Monday on “CBS Mornings.”
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President Biden spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Sunday, the White House said in a statement. The two leaders discussed developments in Gaza and the surrounding region as well as the release of two American hostages, who were freed by Hamas on Friday.
The call came as the United Nations announced that 14 trucks carrying humanitarian aid were allowed to enter Gaza, and one day after the first trucks carrying aid were allowed into Gaza from Egypt to address the unprecedented humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s sealing off of the strip in the wake of Hamas fighters’ bloody rampage on Oct. 7.
“The leaders affirmed that there will now be continued flow of this critical assistance into Gaza,” said the White House readout of the call.
Mr. Biden also expressed his appreciation for Israel’s role in helping to secure the release of an American woman and her teenage daughter on Friday. The two women, who are dual Israeli-American citizens, were the first captives to be freed by Hamas.
“The leaders discussed ongoing efforts to secure the release of all the remaining hostages taken by Hamas – including U.S. citizens – and to provide for safe passage for U.S. citizens and other civilians in Gaza who wish to depart,” the readout said, adding, “The President and the Prime Minister agreed to stay in close touch.”
Mr. Biden on Sunday also discussed the Israel-Hamas war with Pope Francis, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of the United Kingdom, the White House said.
Israel plans to step up its attacks on the Gaza Strip starting Saturday as preparation for the next stage of its war on Hamas, Israel’s military spokesman says.
Asked about a possible ground invasion into Gaza, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari told reporters Saturday night that the military was trying to create optimal conditions beforehand.
“We will deepen our attacks to minimize the dangers to our forces in the next stages of the war. We are going to increase the attacks, from today,” Hagari said.
He repeated his call for residents of Gaza City to head south for their safety.
Egypt’s state-owned Al-Qahera news, which is close to security agencies, said just 20 trucks had crossed into Gaza on Saturday, out of more than 200 trucks carrying roughly 3,000 tons of aid that have been positioned near the crossing for days. The trucks were carrying 44,000 bottles of drinking water from the United Nations children’s agency — enough for 22,000 people for a single day, it said.
The death toll has now reached 4,385 — including 1,756 children and 967 women — in addition to 13,561 injured, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza during a news conference on Saturday. Seventy percent of the casualties are women, children and and elderly people, the ministry spokesperson said.
Israel says Hamas freed two American hostages on Friday who had been held in Gaza since the war began Oct. 7.
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The protest began with a prayer. Several thousand Muslims knelt in rows before the Capitol building yesterday afternoon, their knees resting on the woven rugs they’d brought from home. Women here and men over there, with onlookers to the side. Seen from the Speaker’s Balcony, this ranked congregation would have looked like colorful stripes spanning the grassy width of the National Mall.
“We are witnessing, before our eyes, the slaughter of thousands of people on our streets,” Omar Suleiman, the imam who led the prayer, had said beforehand. “We are witnesses to the cruelty that has been inflicted upon our brothers and sisters in Palestine on a regular basis.”
The prayer group was part of a demonstration hosted by more than a dozen self-described progressive and religious organizations to call for an Israel-Hamas cease-fire. After Hamas massacred more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians, in its October 7 attack, Israeli bombardments of Gaza have reportedly killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, the great majority of whom were also civilians.
Although the protest’s organizers spanned a broad spectrum of faiths and group affiliations, it appeared that most of the rally attendees were Muslim, judging by the sea of multicolored head scarves and traditional dress. But progressives of other faiths were there, too, waving the red, white, and green flag of Palestine. Rally-goers called for President Joe Biden and the United States to stop supporting Israel’s blockade and air assault on Gaza. (The first convoy of trucks carrying aid entered Gaza through Egypt this morning, the United Nations reported.) As I moved through the crowd, we heard speeches from Gazan expats and representatives of progressive groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Movement for Black Lives, the Working Families Party, and the Center for Popular Democracy.
“Enough is enough,” Alpijani Hussein, a Sudanese American government employee who wore a long white tunic, told me. He and a friend carried a banner reading BIDEN GENOCIDE. Every time Hussein, a father of four, sees coverage of children killed in Gaza, he told me, he imagines his own kids wrapped in body bags. “I’m a father,” he said. “I can feel the pain.”
For nearly two weeks, the world has watched, transfixed, as a litany of horrors from the Middle East has unspooled before our eyes. First, the footage from October 7: the tiny towns on the edge of the desert, bullet-riddled and burning. Parents shot, their hands tied. Women driven off on motorcycles and in trucks. The woman whose pants were drenched in blood. And approximately 200 people—including toddlers, teenagers, grandparents—stolen away and still being held hostage.
Then, more death, this time in Gaza. The body of a boy, gray with ash. Rubble and rebar from collapsed concrete buildings or their ghostly shells. TikTok diaries from teenagers with phones powered by backup generators. “They’re bombing us now,” the teens explain, somehow sounding calm. Almost half of Gaza’s population are under 18; all they have known is Hamas rule—the Islamist group took over in 2007—and a series of similar conflicts. A barrage of rockets fired by Hamas and other militants; a wave of air strikes from Israel.
But this time is different: Israel has never been wounded this way—October 7 represented the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust—and over the protest hung a frantic sense that the vengeance had only just begun. Hackles were up and, at one point, a police car drove by, sirens blaring. Two women near me clutched each other nervously, but the officer drove on without stopping.
Inside the Capitol, a plain consensus prevailed: Many members of Congress from both parties have opposed a cease-fire and expressed strong support for the U.S. providing military aid to Israel. But outside, things weren’t so simple; they never are. None of the people I met said they supported Hamas, and certainly not the recent atrocities. But many said that the violence cuts both ways. “Israel is a terrorist country in my eyes—what they’ve been doing to the Palestinians,” Ramana Rashid, from Northern Virginia, told me. Nearby, people held placards reading ISRAEL=COLONIZERS and ZIONISM=OPPRESSION. Many protesters told me they did not believe that Israel has a right to exist. At various points in the protest, the crowd broke into the chant “Palestine will be free! From the river to the sea!” (Whatever that slogan might mean for protesters—an anti-colonial statement or an assertion of homeland—for most Israelis it is clearly denying the Jewish state’s right to exist.)
“A cease-fire is the minimum to save lives,” a D.C. resident named Mikayla, who declined to give her last name, told me. “But what we really need is an end to the occupation.” Leaning against her bike, she shook her head no when I asked whether Egypt should open its doors to fleeing Palestinians. “If Egypt lets Gazans leave the Gaza Strip, then that is the definition of ethnic cleansing,” Mikayla said.
Other protesters I spoke with expressed concern only for ending the daily suffering of Gazans. The humanitarian crisis came first; the rest, the political stuff, would come later.
Sheeba Massood, who’d come with her friend Rashid from Northern Virginia, burst into tears when I asked why she’d wanted to attend. It was important to pray together, she told me. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim, if you’re Palestinian, if you’re a Christian, if you’re Jewish,” Massood said, “we are all witnessing the killing of all of these children that are innocent.” Everything else, she said, was politics.
When I asked the demonstrators what might happen in the region, practically, after a cease-fire was enforced, most of them demurred. “I’m not a politician to know all the details and technicalities of it,” a Virginia man named Shoaib told me. “But I think just for one horrible thing, you don’t just go kill innocent kids.”
Every person I met was angry with Biden. The president has been unwavering in his support for Israel since October 7, and in an Oval Office address on Thursday, he reiterated his case for requesting funds from Congress for military aid to Israel. That same day, a senior State Department official resigned over the administration’s decision to keep sending weapons to Israel without humanitarian conditions.
In his remarks on Thursday, Biden spoke of the need for Americans to oppose anti-Semitism and Islamophobia equally. Friday’s demonstrators, so many of whom were Muslim Americans, were not impressed with that evenhandedness.
“Mr. President, you have failed the test,” Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine, said from the podium outside of the Capitol. Ice-cream trucks parked nearby for tourists played jingles softly as he spoke. “You broke your promise to restore America’s moral authority.” Frankie Seabron, from the Black-led community group Harriet’s Wildest Dreams,led the crowd in chants of “Shame” directed at Biden. “This is a battle against oppression,” she said. “We as Black Americans can understand!” The crowd, which was beginning to thin, cheered its agreement.
As is generally the case, the program went on far too long. After two hours of speeches, the enthusiasm of an already thinned-out crowd was waning. The temperature dropped and raindrops fell, gently at first, then steadily. Finally, after organizers distributed blood-red carnations to every rally-goer, the group began the trek to the president’s house.
The demonstrators marched slowly at first up Pennsylvania Avenue, struggling with their banners in the driving rain. But as the remaining protesters got closer to the White House, the rain paused, and the sun peeked through the dark clouds. The protesters laid their flowers in the square before the White House gates—an offering and a demand for a different future for Gaza.
The border crossing between Egypt and Gaza opened on Saturday to let a trickle of desperately needed aid into the besieged Palestinian territory for the first time since Israel sealed it off in the wake of Hamas’ bloody rampage two weeks ago.
Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians, half of whom have fled their homes, are rationing food and drinking dirty water. Hospitals say they are running low on medical supplies and fuel for emergency generators amid a territory-wide power blackout. Israel is still launching waves of airstrikes across Gaza as Palestinian militants fire rocket barrages into Israel.
The opening came after more than a week of high-level diplomacy by various mediators, including visits to the region by U.S. President Joe Biden and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Israel had insisted that nothing would enter Gaza until some 200 people captured by Hamas were freed, and the Palestinian side of the crossing had been shut down by Israeli airstrikes.
Egypt’s state-owned Al-Qahera news, which is close to security agencies, said just 20 trucks had crossed into Gaza on Saturday, out of more than 200 trucks carrying roughly 3,000 tons of aid that have been positioned near the crossing for days. Hundreds of foreign passport holders also waited to cross from Gaza to Egypt to escape the conflict.
The death toll has now reached 4,385 — including 1,756 children and 967 women — in addition to 13,561 injured, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza during a news conference on Saturday. Seventy percent of the casualties are women, children and and elderly people, the ministry spokesperson said.
Trucks of Egyptian Red Crescent carrying humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip cross the Rafah border gate, in Rafah, Egypt, Saturday, Oct. 21, 2023.
Mohammed Asad / AP
U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement on Saturday supporting the arrival of relief, saying “We urge all parties to keep the Rafah crossing open to enable the continued movement of aid that is imperative to the welfare of the people of Gaza.”
“The United States welcomes the delivery of a 20-truck convoy carrying much needed humanitarian assistance to the people in Gaza, the first since Hamas’s horrific October 7 terrorist attack on Israel,” the statement read. “We thank our partners in Egypt and Israel, and the United Nations, for facilitating the safe passage of these shipments through the Rafah border crossing. With this convoy, the international community is beginning to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza that has left residents of Gaza without access to sufficient food, water, medical care, and safe shelter.”
Meanwhile, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen welcomed the opening of Rafah, calling it “an important first step that will alleviate the suffering of innocent people.”
The World Health Organization said four of the 20 trucks that crossed through Rafah on Saturday were carrying medical supplies, including medicines for the treatment of chronic diseases for 1,500 people, essential supplies for 300,000 people for three months, trauma medicine and supplies for 1,200 people and 235 portable trauma bags for first responders.
The World Food Program said it has another 930 metric tons of emergency food waiting to be brought in through Rafah. It said it needs to replenish its “rapidly diminishing supplies” as it expands food assistance from 520,000 people to 1.1 million in the next two months.
The U.N. said life-saving supplies would be delivered to the Palestinian Red Crescent medical service. But Cindy McCain, the head of the U.N.’s World Food Program, said the aid was insufficient.
This image provided by Maxar Technologies shows aid trucks waiting on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing on Friday, Oct. 20, 2023.
Maxar Technologies / AP
“The situation is catastrophic in Gaza,” McCain said. “We need many, many, many more trucks and a continual flow of aid.”
The Hamas-run government in Gaza also said the limited convoy “will not be able to change the humanitarian catastrophe,” calling for a secure corridor operating around the clock.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, said “the humanitarian situation in Gaza is under control.” He said the aid would be delivered only to southern Gaza, where the army has ordered people to relocate, adding that no fuel would enter the territory.
The opening came hours after Hamas released an American woman and her teenage daughter, the first captives to be freed after the militant group’s Oct. 7 incursion into Israel. It was not immediately clear if there was any connection between the two.
Hamas released Judith Raanan and her 17-year-old daughter, Natalie, on Friday for what it said were humanitarian reasons in an agreement with Qatar, a Persian Gulf nation that has often served as a Mideast mediator.
The two had been on a trip from their home in suburban Chicago to Israel to celebrate Jewish holidays, the family said. They were in the kibbutz of Nahal Oz, near Gaza, when Hamas and other militants stormed into southern Israeli towns, killing hundreds and abducting at least 210 others.
Hamas said it was working with Egypt, Qatar and other mediators “to close the case” of hostages if security circumstances permit.
Intense airstrikes were reported across Gaza overnight and into Saturday. The Hamas-run Health Ministry said 345 people were killed in Gaza in the last 24 hours, and that seven hospitals are out of service after being damaged in strikes or running out of fuel.
The Hamas-run Housing Ministry said at least 30% of all homes in Gaza have been destroyed or heavily damaged in the war. That figure does not include the destruction of entire neighborhoods, which the U.N. refugee agency now describes as “inaccessible mounds of rubble.”
There are growing expectations of a ground offensive that Israel says would be aimed at rooting out Hamas, an Islamic militant group that has ruled Gaza for 16 years. Israel said Friday it does not plan to take long-term control over the small but densely populated Palestinian territory.
Israel has also traded fire along its northern border with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group, raising concerns about a second front opening up. The Israeli military said Saturday it struck Hezbollah targets in Lebanon in response to recent rocket launches and attacks with anti-tank missiles.
Palestinians gather over the remains of a destroyed house following Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City, Saturday, Oct. 21, 2023.
Abed Khaled / AP
Israel issued a travel warning on Saturday, ordering its citizens to leave Egypt and Jordan — which made peace with it decades ago — and to avoid travel to a number of Arab and Muslim countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Bahrain, which forged diplomatic ties with Israel in 2020. Protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza have erupted across the region.
A potential Israeli ground assault is likely to lead to a dramatic escalation in casualties on both sides in urban fighting. More than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed in the war — mostly civilians slain during the Hamas incursion. Palestinian militants have continued to launch unrelenting rocket attacks into Israel — more than 6,900 projectiles since Oct. 7, according to Israel.
More than 4,100 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry run by Hamas. That includes a disputed number of people who died in a hospital explosion earlier this week. The ministry says another 1,400 are believed to have been buried under rubble, alive or dead.
Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Friday laid out a three-stage plan, beginning with Israeli airstrikes and “maneuvering” — a presumed reference to a ground attack — that would aim to root out Hamas. Next would come a lower intensity fight to defeat remaining pockets. Then a new “security regime” would be created in Gaza along with “the removal of Israel’s responsibility for life in the Gaza Strip,” Gallant said.
He did not say who Israel expected to run Gaza if Hamas is toppled or what the new security regime would entail.
Israel occupied Gaza from 1967 until 2005, when it pulled up settlements and withdrew soldiers. Two years later, Hamas took over. Some Israelis blame the withdrawal from Gaza for the five wars and countless smaller exchanges of fire since then.
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi proposed a very different scenario on Saturday as he hosted a summit to discuss the war. He called for ensuring aid to Gaza, negotiating a cease-fire and resuming Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which last broke down more than a decade ago.
Over a million people have been displaced in Gaza. Many heeded Israel’s orders to evacuate from north to south within the sealed-off enclave on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. But Israel has continued to bomb areas in southern Gaza where Palestinians had been told to seek safety, and some appear to be going back to the north because of bombings and difficult living conditions in the south.
Israel said its ongoing airstrikes hit more Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip Friday, as it began evacuating a town near its northern border with Lebanon, where almost daily exchanges of fire with the other major Iran-backed group in the region, Hezbollah, have fueled fear of new fronts opening almost two weeks into the war sparked by Hamas’ deadly terror attack.
Israel’s military has accused Hamas of killing about 1,400 people in that attack and seizing at least 203 hostages during the rampage. The military said Hamas kidnapped Israeli soldiers, but also dozens of civilians, including as many as 20 people over the age of 60 and more than 20 under 18. One Israeli family shared their heartache with CBS News on Friday as they waited desperately for any word on a 10-month-old baby among the captives.
A senior Israeli military leader told soldiers Thursday they would soon “see Gaza from the inside,” suggesting a long-expected ground invasion was still looming, but fear the conflict could spread beyond Israel’s borders and the decimated Palestinian territory were only growing Friday.
Hezbollah has exchanged deadly fire with Israeli forces for more than a week, but it has so far been relatively limited cross-border shelling. The powerful Iran-backed group is based in Lebanon, and it has a large arsenal of long-range rockets.
With tension along the northern border soaring, Israel’s Ministry of Defense announced Friday that the roughly 20,000 residents of the town of Kiryat Shmona, near that Lebanese border, would be evacuated.
A map shows Israel, with Jerusalem and other major cities labeled, along with the Palestinian territories of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
Getty/iStockphoto
Another militant force in the region that’s considered by the U.S. and Israel to be an Iranian proxy group is the Houthi movement, which has fought Yemen’s Western-backed government in a brutal civil war for almost a decade. On Thursday, the Pentagon said a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Red Sea had shot down cruise missiles and drones launched by the Houthis, which may have been aimed at Israel.
Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said the U.S. was still completing its assessment of where the three intercepted ballistic missiles were headed, but if they were intended for Israel, it would be the first direct U.S. military intervention to protect Israel from its regional foes since Hamas’ unprecedented attack.
A U.S. defense official confirmed to CBS News, meanwhile, that an American military base near Baghdad, Iraq, was targeted in a new rocket attack. Reports of U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria being targeted by drones have increased since the Israel-Hamas war erupted, and Iran-backed militias in northern Iraq and Syria have long targeted American forces in the region.
President Biden has warned Iran and its regional allies repeatedly and clearly not to get involved in Israel’s war with Hamas.
Speaking Friday to journalists at the Iranian Embassy in London, charge d’affaires Mehdi Hosseini Matin said Iran’s “first priority is stopping the war, not escalation.”
He was dismissive of the level of influence Iran could exert over allied groups in the region, claiming the Islamic republic was “not in a position to control any group effectively in the Middle East or in border countries with Gaza.”
The Iranian regime has said Hamas’ brutal terror attack on southern Israel was a justifiable response to “the establishment of an open air prison in Gaza for more than two decades,” which Matin said Friday was “absolutelyunacceptable according to international law.”
Calling the situation in the region “very volatile and dangerous,” Matin said any further “escalation is not in the interest of anyone, including the United States.”
Anger in the West Bank and Egypt
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, clashes between Israelis and Palestinians had been increasing for a year even before Hamas’ terror attack. Palestinian officials in the Israeli-occupied territory, which is not controlled by Hamas like Gaza, say more than 70 people have died in confrontations with Israeli forces and armed Jewish settlers since Oct. 7.
Palestinian officials said a rare Israeli airstrike in the region, reportedly hitting a refugee camp near the West Bank-Israel border, killed 13 people on Friday, and anger was growing over that strike and the ongoing bombing of the Gaza Strip.
“It was horrible for all the Palestinians. Not just for Palestinians but I think for everybody in the world who saw this horror of what’s going on in the Gaza Strip,” Jamal Joumaa, a Palestinian activist who joined a demonstration in central Ramallah on Friday, told CBS News.
Hundreds protest against Israel’s airstrikes in solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, in Ramallah, West Bank, Oct. 20, 2023.
CBS News/Haley Ott
The protest swelled as Palestinians poured out of mosques following Friday prayers, with many chanting support for Hamas. Palestinian and Hamas flags could be seen in the crowd of a few hundred people.
“Give me a two state solution tomorrow, I will accept it. But this became impossible because of the American policies, because of the American backing of the colonial state,” Joumaa told CBS News, referring to Israel.
“I want the Americans first to know that they are supporting a crime of genocide in Gaza,” he said, adding that the leaders of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, based in Ramallah, had failed the people.
Another protester, 18-year-old Abeer Iyad Hassan al-Bezzary, told CBS News she was angry, “but what can we do here? We just pray for them [Gazans] to be safe.”
“We feel President Biden is taking one side… the ones who have force, the power. They [Israelis] have the weapons, they have everything,” Ahmad abu Dukhan told CBS News at the protest.
In Egypt, the only country to share a border with Gaza apart from Israel, the authoritarian government has made protests of any kind illegal, but there was a significant one Friday in the very heart of Cairo, in Tahrir Square. Elsewhere in the city, the government has not only allowed pro-Palestinian protests, it’s encouraging them, journalist and opposition activist Khaled Dawoud told CBS News on Friday.
“The anger is like, so widespread,” he said. “You can’t control it… We see the pictures, we see the Palestinian children, we identify with them… So, we get angry, and we go in the street and demonstrate and protest.”
People march from Tahrir Square to the downtown district of Cairo, Oct. 20, 2023, during a protest supporting the Palestinian people following Friday Noon prayers.
KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty
Asked if he believed the Egyptian government, by allowing the protests, was trying to send a warning that the Hamas-Israel could spread, Dawoud acknowledged that the demonstrations could help leaders in Cairo, who worry an escalation could send thousands of Palestinian refugees pouring over the Gaza border.
But, he stressed that he and the other protesters were “not acting by remote control. These feelings are genuine.”
Gaza airstrikes and the Rafah border crossing
The Israeli military said Friday that it had struck more than 100 Hamas targets in Gaza overnight, including command centers, warehouses full of weapons and an underground tunnel.
Palestinians in Gaza reported airstrikes in the south, where many civilians have relocated after being told by Israel’s military that the northern part of the small, densely populated enclave would not be safe. The United Nations has said more than one million people have been displaced within Gaza since Israel started striking the region in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
Nobody has been able to flee Gaza, however, and there are as many as 600 U.S. nationals among the roughly 2.3 million people trapped there under a complete Israeli blockade of the strip.
That blockade has cut off supplies of food, energy and medicine to the decimated Palestinian territory, fueling an already monumental humanitarian crisis amid the shelling and drawing warnings from experts that Israel could be answering Hamas’ war crimes with war crimes of its own.
Israeli leaders have consistently dismissed such warnings, insisting the country is only targeting Hamas militants and blaming the group itself — which has long been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., Israel and most European nations — for all deaths in the Palestinian territory that it controls and that it used as a launch pad for its brutal attack.
President Biden, during his visit earlier in the week, got Israel to commit to halting its strikes near the only border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, at Rafah, to enable aid to get in, but it remained unclear Friday when the gates might actually open. Crews were working to repair the Rafah crossing, with about 20 trucks full of humanitarian aid waiting on the Egyptian side.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing Friday and, surrounded by food and medical supplies waiting to be shipped out, he urged all sides to open humanitarian routes into Gaza.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (center) inspects aid materials waiting to be moved across the Rafah crossing from Egypt into the Gaza Strip, Oct. 20, 2023.
Handout/UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe
“On this side, we have seen so many trucks loaded with water, with fuel, with medicines, with food. They are a lifeline. They are the difference between life and death for so many people in Gaza,” Guterres said. “What we need is to make them move, to make them move to the other side of this wall, to make them move as quickly as possible and as many as possible.”
The Egyptian Sinai for Human Rights group posted video of what it said were aid workers lined up Friday with vehicles on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing, saying in a tweet that they were, “awaiting the opening of the crossing in the coming hours to bring humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip for the first time since the beginning of the war.”
What is Israel’s plan in Gaza?
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of his country’s legislature, the Knesset, on Friday that the war Hamas started with its Oct. 7 terror attack would end with group’s destruction.
“We are at war, we have been left no choice. October 7th will be remembered as the day that started the destruction of Hamas,” Gallant told the lawmakers, laying out for the first time a vague outline of Israel’s planned military operation — which leaders have said could take months or even years.
He said the objectives of Israel’s three-phase operation included the elimination of Hamas as a power in Gaza, with both its military and governing capabilities destroyed, followed eventually by the establishment of a new “security reality” in the Palestinian territory.
Gallant said Israel was still in the first of the three stages: “A military campaign that currently includes strikes, and will later include maneuvering, with the objective of neutralizing terrorists and destroying Hamas infrastructure,” which he said would be followed by a second phase focused on “eliminating pockets of resistance” in Gaza.
“The third phase,” Gallant said, “will require the removal of Israel’s responsibility for life in the Gaza Strip, and the establishment of a new security reality for the citizens of Israel.”
In an interview with 60 Minutes last week, President Biden said “Israel has to respond. They have to go after Hamas,” but the U.S. leader warned that an Israeli occupation of Gaza would be “a big mistake.”
NOTE: The original version of this article incorrectly described Hezbollah is a Palestinian group. It has been updated to reflect that it is a Shiite Muslim group based in Lebanon.
CBS News’ Pamela Falk at the United Nations and Emmet Lyons in London contributed to this report.
A mother and daughter from Chicago who were taken hostage by Hamas militants during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel were freed from Gaza on Friday. Judith Raanan and her 17-year-old daughter Natalie were kidnapped after coming to Israel to celebrate the 85th birthday of Judith’s mother. There are still about 200 hostages from 40 countries being held by Hamas. Charlie D’Agata reports.
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Along the Gaza Strip’s southern border with Egypt, repairs are underway at the Rafah crossing, as 90 trucks of humanitarian aid wait to get aid in, while foreign passport holders, including U.S. citizens, are waiting to get out. This comes as Israeli forces mass on Gaza’s northern and eastern borders preparing for a ground invasion that has forced more than 600,000 Gazans to evacuate from northern to southern Gaza. Imtiaz Tyab has more.
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President Biden addressed the nation Thursday night to discuss the Israel-Hamas war and the war in Ukraine. Mr. Biden argued that funding for both Israel and Ukraine is important to U.S. national security. Weijia Jiang has more.
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Israel resumed its bombardment of Gaza following a brief pause during President Biden’s visit. Gaza officials say the death toll was close to 4,000 on Thursday. Charlie D’Agata has the latest on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
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Israeli airstrikes on Gaza continued a day after President Biden visited Tel Aviv and gave the country’s leaders and people his firm support as the Jewish state grapples with the perilous realities of its war against Hamas militants. Tension in the region was still rising Thursday over Israel’s relentless strikes on Gaza — and warring narratives over what happened at the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday night, where Palestinian officials say an explosion killed hundreds of people.
U.S. and Israeli officials including Mr. Biden said Wednesday that evidence shows the explosion was caused by a rocket fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group that fell short of its target, but many in the region still blame the carnage on the Israeli military.
Protests have erupted across the Middle East in the wake of the deadly blast, including in Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco. At demonstrations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinian officials said two teenagers were shot dead by Israeli forces. The Israeli military said it was looking into the report.
Mr. Biden backed Israel’s right to quash Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip for almost two decades, but he urged Israelis not to be consumed by rage, warning that wartime decisions made without careful consideration would lead to mistakes.
The U.S. leader secured a commitment from Israel to stop bombing the area around Egypt’s Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip so desperately needed humanitarian aid can flow into the enclave for the first time since Israel imposed a complete blockade on Oct. 7.
But it remained unclear on Thursday when the border would open, and instead of aid, it was still Israeli missiles reaching Gaza’s two million inhabitants. A residential building just yards from the Al Quds hospital in Gaza City was struck Wednesday, sending medical staff and civilians running for cover inside.
As of Thursday, health officials in Hamas-controlled Gaza say Israeli strikes have killed almost 3,500 people and wounded more than 12,000 others, a majority of them women and children. That number includes more than 470 said to have been killed in the hospital blast, which Israel denies causing.
In Israel, officials say Hamas’ attack killed some 1,400 people and wounded 3,500 others.
Follow the latest developments below, and you can click here to see the major developments from Wednesday.
Jeff Glor reports on new efforts to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, what President Biden achieved during a visit to Israel, and the ongoing battle to elect a House Speaker.
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Omer Neutra was born in America, but went to study in Israel and eventually joined the IDF. He was taken hostage by Hamas militants during their surprise attack on Israel. Jim Axelrod spoke with Neutra’s family, who are holding out hope he will come home safe.
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As Israel and Palestinian authorities blame each other for the deadly blast at a hospital in Gaza, Palestinians are left to sift through the rubble of what they thought would be a safe haven. Imtiaz Tyab reports.
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President Biden met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. Mr. Biden blamed Palestinian militants for a deadly blast at a hospital in Gaza, which Hamas insists was the result of an Israeli air strike. Charlie D’Agata reports.
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Still reeling from an explosion outside Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, medical workers spoke of the destruction that left hundreds there dead. “We haven’t seen anything like this in our lives,” said one doctor.
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Soliman Hijjy, Mark Boyer, Chevaz Clarke and Neil Collier
President Biden landed in Tel Aviv, Israel, Wednesday morning, where he was greeted with an embrace by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Biden was to meet Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders in a show of support amid Israel’s war with the Palestinian militant group Hamas, and his first remarks were a strong show of that support, as he backed Israel’s firm denial of responsibility for a deadly explosion at a hospital in the Gaza Strip.
A second diplomatic stop, when Mr. Biden had been set to meet with Arab leaders in Jordan, was canceled following Tuesday’s massive hospital blast in Gaza City, which officials in the Hamas-run territory said had killed at least 500 people.
The White House had intended Mr. Biden’s visit to show the firm U.S. commitment to Israel’s right to self defense, and to try to contain quickly escalating tension in the region and prevent the war from spreading, but the hospital blast — which Palestinian leaders and neigboring Arab nations quickly blamed on Israel — severely complicated what was already a challenging diplomatic mission for the veteran statesman.
Israel’s military has vehemently denied responsibility for the hospital explosion, blaming a rocket fired by Islamic Jihad militants in Gaza that it said fell short and hit a parking lot next to the hospital. The U.S. government has not offered its own formal assessment of the evidence in the blast, but Mr. Biden told Netanyahu that “based on what I’ve seen, it appears it was done by the other team.”
President Biden is welcomed by Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu as he visits Israel amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 18, 2023.
EVELYN HOCKSTEIN/REUTERS
Word of the explosion sparked angry demonstrations across the Arab world on Tuesday night, and in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Mr. Biden’s visit follows a grueling 10-stop, five-day trip to the Middle East by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who met for seven hours Monday with Israel’s wartime cabinet “to try to work on a framework” to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza, the National Security Council’s John Kirby told CBS News.
Relentless Israeli airstrikes and the complete blockade of the Gaza Strip imposed by Israel in the wake of Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 terror attack have driven roughly half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents from their homes and created a humanitarian crisis as food, fuel and water all run desperately short. Palestinian officials said Tuesday that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza had killed about 3,000 people and wounded around 12,500 others, a majority of them women and children.
In Israel, officials say Hamas’ attack killed some 1,400 people and wounded 3,500 others. Hamas is said to be holding almost 200 hostages. Thirteen U.S. nationals remain unaccounted for.
At least 31 U.S. citizens are among the dead in Israel, and as many as 600 U.S. nationals are thought to be among the hundreds of thousands of people trapped in Gaza.
The Gaza Health Ministry said at least 500 people were killed Tuesday when an airstrike hit a hospital compound in the center of Gaza City. Israeli officials denied targeting the hospital and said they believed the blast was caused by a rocket from Hamas or Islamic Jihad that fell short and struck the site. CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata reports.
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