Middle East Crisis: As Diplomats Visit, Israel Signals It Will Answer Iran’s Attack (2024)

Israel will respond to Iran’s attack from last weekend, Britain’s foreign minister says.

The British foreign secretary, David Cameron, acknowledged just before meeting with the prime minister that Israel was unlikely to heed pleas to turn the other cheek.

“It is clear that the Israelis are making a decision to act,” Mr. Cameron told the BBC. “We hope that they do so in a way that does as little to escalate this as possible.”

The United States, Britain and Germany have been urging Israel to avoid making moves that could increase tension with Iran, which launched around 300 missiles and drones on Saturday night in what was believed to be its first direct attack on Israel. Most of the missiles and drones were shot down before they reached their targets — thanks in part to the assistance of the United States, Britain, France and Jordan — and the ones that got through did minimal damage.

Mr. Netanyahu thanked Israel’s allies for their “support in words and support in actions” in remarks before a cabinet meeting, according to his office. But he added: “They also have all kinds of suggestions and advice. I appreciate it, but I want to make it clear — we will make our own decisions.”

Iran warned that it would react forcefully to any Israeli aggression, with the army’s commander in chief, Maj. Gen. Abdolrahim Mousavi, saying on Wednesday: “We will respond with more deadly weapons.”

Israel’s war cabinet has met several times since the weekend with no apparent decision on when and how to strike back against the attack. Officials are said to be considering a range of options, from a direct strike on Iran to a cyberattack or targeted assassinations, trying to send a clear message to Iran while not sparking a major escalation.

“Israel will respond when it sees fit,” an Israeli official said on Wednesday, adding that it had “multiple ways” to do so. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The president of the European Council, Charles Michel, announced early Thursday that new European sanctions would be imposed on Iran’s drone and missile programs as punishment for last weekend’s attacks.

“It’s a clear signal that we want to send,” Mr. Michel said, emerging after midnight from a meeting of leaders of the European Union’s member states in Brussels. “We need to isolate Iran.” He said more details about the new sanctions would be announced in the coming days.

Adam Rasgon and Lara Jakes contributed reporting.

The U.N. seeks $2.8 billion in donations for the response to the crisis in Gaza.

The cost of addressing it may be similarly staggering.

The U.N. said its agencies and other aid groups would need more than $2.8 billion from their donors to continue their response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza for the rest of the year.

“Widespread destruction. Multiple mass displacements. Looming famine. Collapsed health system,” the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement. “Every day is a struggle for survival for people in Gaza, as the war rages on and needs deepen.”

The amount requested, $2.8 billion, is only a portion of what the U.N. has estimated the full price tag of responding to the crisis to be: $4.089 billion. A majority of the money requested ($2.5 billion) would pay for relief work in Gaza, while a smaller amount ($297.6 million) would go to the West Bank, where violence has flared for months.

The U.N. scaled down its funding request to $2.8 billion needed to pay only for operations that appeared to be achievable in the next nine months, during which it assumed “many of the current security concerns and access limitations will continue.”

The war in Gaza began after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, which Israeli officials said killed roughly 1,200 people. Since then, the distribution of aid in Gaza has been hobbled by a cascade of restrictions and dangers.

More than 200 aid workers have been killed during the conflict, a vast majority of them Palestinians from Gaza, according to U.N. Secretary General António Guterres. Earlier this month, seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, including six foreigners, were killed in a series of airstrikes on their convoy.

Their deaths started an international outcry and led to an internal investigation by the Israeli military, which reprimanded the personnel responsible for the strikes and said their killings were a mistake.

In the early months of the war, Israel imposed a near-total blockade on goods going into the Gaza Strip, including humanitarian assistance. It eventually relented, but insisted that entering shipments be meticulously inspected, and it barred a wide range of items, like scissors, that it said could have a potential military use.

Aid groups have said that whole trucks of aid have been turned away by Israeli inspectors because a single item on board was determined to have a possible military use. Groups are sometimes not told what the item was or why it was rejected, they say.

Israel has also accused Hamas of diverting aid. But American officials, including Samantha Power, the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and David Satterfield, the U.S. special envoy for humanitarian issues in the Middle East, have said there is no evidence for that claim.

The U.N. demanded that Israel improve the conditions under which aid is delivered, including by guaranteeing aid workers safe access to people in need, increasing the number of entry points and secure roads for humanitarian supplies, and improving the ability of aid workers to safely move around in Gaza.

In recent weeks, Israel has been eager to show that more aid is flowing into Gaza, and it has also been keen to blame the U.N. for delays in its distribution.

This week, Israel said that 553 aid trucks passed through the Kerem Shalom and the Nitzana border crossings and that 126 trucks were permitted to travel from southern Gaza to northern Gaza.

A Gazan describes losing four nieces and nephews in an attack that killed children playing in the street.

Four members of the extended family, ranging in age from 3 to 18 years old, were killed, according to Yousef Abu Jayyab, their 24-year-old uncle. Three more were left in critical condition.

Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, said the strike was an Israeli attack that killed at least 11 people, many of them children. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Abu Jayyab said the strike hit less than 10 meters from where the children were playing. “One strike, but that was enough to kill them,” he said.

Footage verified by The New York Times shows the chaotic aftermath of the strike, with a stream of injured children being carried away by bystanders, abandoned shoes lying in puddles of blood and bodies and debris in front of the foosball table.

At the Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, photos from The Associated Press show one stretcher arriving with the bodies of two children, one on top of the other, as other children watched in distress.

Mr. Abu Jayyab, a student who lives in the nearby Nuseirat refugee camp, said he rushed to the hospital to search for relatives after he learned of the attack.

In the hospital’s morgue, he found the body of his niece, 9-year-old Luji. Mr. Abu Jayyab said Luji had been eager to meet the new baby that her parents, Mr. Abu Jayyab’s brother and sister-in-law, were expecting. In his grief, Luji’s father decided they would name the baby after her, Mr. Abu Jayyab said.

By the time Mr. Abu Jayyab and his brother had buried Luji and returned to the hospital, they learned that her 3-year-old sister, Mila, had also died from her injuries.

Luji and Mila’s only surviving sibling, 7-year-old Ahmed, was injured in the strike and remains in critical condition. “Doctors say he needs a miracle to survive, and we should prepare ourselves for the bad news,” Mr. Abu Jayyab said in a phone interview.

Two of the girls’ cousins, 15-year-old Ahmed and 18-year-old Abdullah, as well as a 60-year-old neighbor were also killed in the strike, Mr. Abu Jayyab said. Two other cousins in the family were severely injured.

More than 33,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel’s military offensive began Oct. 7, including nearly 14,000 children, according to local health officials and the United Nations.

Aric Toler contributed reporting.

Two bakeries reopen in hunger-stricken Gaza City, but the question is for how long.

Fuel needed to power the two bakeries was delivered by the United Nations last Sunday and was scheduled to run out by Friday, Abeer Etefa, a spokeswoman for the U.N. World Food Program, said. It was not clear when more fuel would arrive, she said.

Northern Gaza has been largely cut off from aid since Israel’s military offensive in Gaza began in October, and most bakeries there have been closed for months because of the fighting.

Last week, a senior U.S. official told Congress that expert projections showed the north was experiencing a famine, but on Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel rejected that claim, saying that “Israel was going above and beyond in the humanitarian sphere.”

Facing pressure from the Biden administration and other allies to ease the humanitarian crisis, Israel has been eager to show that more aid is entering northern Gaza, especially since its strike on April 1 that killed seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen, a food charity.

This week, the United Nations shared video online that showed bags of flour piled high in bakery storerooms and Palestinian children clapping for the aid truck from their windows.

The two bakeries were able to reopen because the United Nations, with the permission of the Israeli military, was able to bring in enough fuel and flour in recent days. Still, the World Food Program said that cooperation needed to continue to avert a disaster. “We need safe and sustained access to prevent famine,” the organization said.

Matt Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, praised the bakery openings but said more needed to be done.

“We have seen improvement — not yet to the level where it needs to be, and certainly once it gets to that level, we need to see it sustained over time, and that’s how we’re going to judge things,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

Kamel Ajour, who owns one of the bakeries, said that the two bakeries together can turn out a million pieces of bread each day. The U.N. provided the fuel and flour to run both operations, he said.

“Bread is the most important thing in life after water,” Mr. Ajour, 51, said in a phone interview. “The starvation in northern Gaza is very dangerous. We need to put an end to it. This effort is one of the solutions.”

Bags of 50 pieces of bread were sold for five shekels, or roughly $1.30, he said. The U.N. said that was the lowest price bread had sold for in months.

But Mazen Harazeen, 39, a paramedic in Gaza City with nine children, said even five shekels was too much for many Gazans. He has continued to work as a paramedic during the war, but has not received a full paycheck in six months.

“People line up there for around three hours to get one and only one bag of bread,” Mr. Harazeen said, adding that he had walked nearly two miles to reach one of the bakeries. Their impact, he said, would be “very small.”

Maher Al-Mashharawi, 28, a software developer in Gaza City, said he had tried several times to get bread from one of the two bakeries, but on every attempt he was stymied by a seemingly endless line and left empty-handed.

“It’s really frustrating,” he said. “We’ve been hoping things will get better, but we’re still facing difficulties.”

But he said food prices had dropped significantly in recent days. A 25-kilogram bag of flour now costs 70 shekels compared with 1,900 during the worst days of the war, he said, and a kilogram of apples was 20 shekels, down from 120.

Israel’s bombing campaign and ground invasion have devastated the north, leading to a breakdown in civil order and chaos and violence engulfing many efforts to distribute aid.

Mr. Ajour said security for the bakeries was being provided by “private companies” and by bakery workers themselves, and that fences were built around both operations. He did not elaborate on who ran or staffed the private security companies.

Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.

A Hezbollah attack injures 14 soldiers in northern Israel.

An internal Israeli army memo said an initial investigation found that Hezbollah had fired two anti-tank rockets at an Israeli Bedouin border village, Arab al-Aramshe, before dispatching an exploding drone. An Israeli military spokeswoman declined to comment on the memo.

A senior Israeli defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive operational issues, expressed concern about Hezbollah’s apparent ability to determine soldiers’ whereabouts and subsequently target them.

Hezbollah said its attack on the village was in response to the Israeli airstrikes a day earlier that Israel’s military said had killed the commanders. Those strikes triggered a series of retaliatory attacks by Hezbollah on Israeli military bases and barracks.

Hezbollah claimed that the target on Wednesday was an Israeli military reconnaissance unit. The military said that six soldiers had been severely injured, two moderately injured and six lightly injured. It said it had responded to the attack with strikes on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.

Later on Wednesday, Lebanese state media reported an Israeli strike deep inside Lebanon in the Bekaa Valley, a bastion of support for Hezbollah that straddles the Syrian border. The Israeli military said its fighter jets had hit “significant” Hezbollah infrastructure.

For more than six months, Hezbollah and Israel have been locked in a tense cross-border conflict set off by the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that was led by Hamas, another of Iran’s proxy groups. The fighting has displaced tens of thousands of civilians on both sides of the border, and in recent months Israeli strikes on Lebanon have begun to creep deeper into the country’s interior.

On Tuesday, the Israeli military said that aircraft had eliminated Ismail Yusaf Baz, who it claimed was the commander of Hezbollah’s coastal sector, and Muhammad Hussein Mustafa Shechory, who it said was a commander in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit. Mr. Baz “served as a senior and veteran official in several positions of Hezbollah’s military wing,” the Israeli military said in a statement.

The funeral for the two men took place on Wednesday in southern Lebanon, with their coffins — draped in Hezbollah’s yellow and green flag — carried through the streets by jostling crowds.

Before the targeted strikes on Tuesday, Hezbollah claimed to have also used explosive drones to target Iron Dome platforms in Beit Hillel, a border town in northern Israel. Israel’s Iron Dome system is one of the country’s key missile defense systems and proved instrumental in shielding it from Iran’s drone and missile attack over the weekend.

Nascent U.S.-led diplomatic efforts remain underway to end the fighting along the Lebanese-Israeli border. But Hezbollah has consistently made clear that it will not enter into any diplomatic talks until Israel ends its war on Gaza.

Aaron Boxerman, Johnatan Reiss and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

U.N. report describes physical abuse and dire conditions in Israeli detention.

The New York Times has not interviewed the witnesses who spoke to UNRWA aid workers and could not independently verify their accounts. None of the witnesses were quoted by name. Still, some of the testimonies in the report matched accounts provided to The Times by more than a dozen freed detainees and their relatives in January, who spoke of beatings and harsh interrogations.

Israeli forces have arrested thousands of Gazans during their six-month campaign against Hamas, the Palestinian armed group. The Israeli military says it arrests those suspected of involvement in Hamas and other groups, but women, children and older people have also been detained, according to the UNRWA report.

The Israeli military and the Israeli prime minister’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the report. But asked about similar accusations of abuse in the past, Israeli officials have said that detainees are held according to the law and that their basic rights are respected.

UNRWA staff gathered testimonies from more than 100 released Gazans arriving at the Kerem Shalom crossing over several months. Palestinian medics would occasionally rush freed prisoners who were injured or ill directly to area hospitals, the report said, adding that they sometimes bore “signs of trauma and ill-treatment.”

Many of the detainees are taken to military holding facilities inside Israel, from which many of them are then funneled into Israel’s civilian prisons. At least 1,500 detainees had been released by the Israeli authorities at Kerem Shalom as of April 4, the report said.

The detainees’ treatment in prison included “being subjected to beatings while made to lie on a thin mattress on top of rubble for hours without food, water or access to a toilet, with their legs and hands bound with plastic ties,” the UNRWA report said.

In the report, one freed prisoner described how an Israeli officer threatened to kill her whole family in an airstrike if she did not provide the Israelis with more information. Another said he had been forced to sit on an electrical probe that burned his anus.

Some freed Gazans told aid workers that they had been beaten on their genitals, aggressively searched and sexually groped, the UNRWA report said. Women said they had been forced to strip in front of male officers, the report said, suggesting that some of the incidents “may amount to sexual violence and harassment.”

When presented with the findings in a draft of the UNRWA report that was leaked last month, the Israeli military said that all mistreatment of detainees was “absolutely prohibited,” adding that all “concrete complaints regarding inappropriate behavior are forwarded to the relevant authorities for review.” It said medical care was readily available for all detainees and that mistreatment of detainees “violates I.D.F. values.”

The Israeli military said last month that it was aware of the deaths of 27 Palestinians in its custody, at least some of whom were already wounded. And at least 10 Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, have died in Israel’s civilian prison system since Oct. 7, according to the official Palestinian prisoners’ commission and Israeli rights groups, including Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, whose doctors attended some of the autopsies.

UNRWA, a key provider of humanitarian assistance in Gaza, has come under scrutiny in recent months after Israel accused it of harboring numerous Hamas members in its ranks. Major foreign donors, including the United States, subsequently suspended their funding for the agency, although some have since resumed it.

Israel has said that at least 30 of the group’s 13,000 staffers in Gaza participated in the Hamas-led assault on Israel on Oct. 7 or its aftermath.

In response to the accusations, UNRWA fired staff members who were accused of being Hamas members. Two investigations have been opened into the allegations — one by the U.N.’s internal investigations body and another by independent reviewers appointed by the U.N. secretary general.

In the report released on Tuesday, UNRWA said some of its own staff members had been beaten, threatened, stripped, humiliated and abused while being detained by the Israeli authorities. It said that during interrogations, they were pressured to say that UNRWA had affiliations with Hamas and that its staff members took part in the Oct. 7 attack.

Here’s where Israel’s military offensive in Gaza stands.

Here is a look at where the military conflict stands:

Southern Gaza

Israel withdrew its forces from southern Gaza this month, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that the military still plans to invade Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, to “complete the elimination of Hamas’s battalions” and to destroy its tunnel networks.

The timing of any operation in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, is unclear. President Biden is among many world leaders who have urged Israel not to invade the city because of the harm it could cause civilians. Rafah’s population has swelled to over a million, as people have flocked there for shelter from fighting elsewhere, and border crossings in southern Gaza are a main conduit for humanitarian aid.

Northern Gaza

Israel began its ground invasion in northern Gaza in late October, urging civilians to leave. Much of the north, including Gaza City, has been destroyed by airstrikes and ground combat. Israel began to pull its forces from northern Gaza in January, saying it had dismantled Hamas’s military structure there.

In March, however, Israeli troops mounted an operation at Al-Shifa Hospital, in Gaza City, where it said Hamas fighters had returned. Israeli troops said they had killed about 200 fighters and captured 500 more. The hospital, once Gaza’s largest, was left in ruins.

Some analysts said the raid showed that by leaving northern Gaza without a plan in place for governing the area, Israel had made it possible for Hamas to return. At the same time, some civilians who had fled south and attempted to return via a coastal road said this week that Israeli forces had fired on them. Their testimony could not be independently confirmed.

Central Gaza

The Israeli troops that remain in Gaza are mainly guarding a road that the military has built across the center of the strip to facilitate its operations. The Institute for the Study of War, a research group, said that was consistent with Israel’s plans to shift to a strategy of more targeted raids rather than wider assaults.

Israel retains the capacity to launch airstrikes anywhere in Gaza and it has conducted several around the central city of Deir al Balah. This month, Israeli planes attacked a convoy of the World Central Kitchen charity near the city, killing seven aid workers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has said that Israel regrets the strikes.

Across the territory

Experts say the Israeli military has had considerable success in dismantling Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades. It has broken the strength of most of its battalions with tens of thousands of airstrikes and ground combat, said Robert Blecher, an expert at the International Crisis Group think tank.

Israel has also killed at least one of Hamas’s top commanders and has destroyed some of the tunnels in which the group operates. But Hamas retains significant organizational and military capacity, particularly in southern Gaza where its tunnel network acts as a shield, and its leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is still at large.

“Israel has done a good job of disabling those stronger battalions,” Mr. Blecher said, but he added: “Hamas is going to remain as an insurgent force.”