Israeli troops mistakenly killed three Israeli hostages during combat with Hamas in the Gaza Strip on Friday, the Israeli military said.
The incident took place in Shejaiye, one of the densely populated communities in northern Gaza that the Israeli military has identified as a Hamas stronghold.
Israeli forces “mistakenly identified three Israeli hostages as a threat,” the military said in a statement. “As a result, the troops fired toward them and they were killed. During searches and checks in the area in which the incident occurred, a suspicion arose over the identities of the deceased. Their bodies were transferred to Israeli territory for examination, after which it was confirmed that they were three Israeli hostages.”
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Yotam Haim
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Hostages and Missing Families Forum/via Reuters
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Samer Talalka
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Hostages and Missing Families Forum/via Reuters
The military identified two of the hostages, who were kidnapped during the Hamas-led assault on Israel on Oct. 7, as Yotam Haim, who was taken from Kibbutz Kfar Aza; and Samer Talalka, who was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Am. The family of the third has requested that the name not be released, the military said.
The military said it was investigating the incident.
The office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, released a statement calling the killings “an unbearable tragedy” and expressing empathy for the hostages’ families along with support for Israeli soldiers “who are devoted to the sacred mission of returning our hostages, even at the cost of their lives.”
“Even on this difficult evening,” the statement said, “we will bind up our wounds, learn the lessons and continue with a supreme effort to return all our hostages home safely.”
Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, on Friday played down differences between the United States and Israel over the war against Hamas in Gaza, even as Mr. Biden has escalated criticism of Israel’s conduct.
A day after Biden administration officials saidthey wanted Israel to end its large-scale ground and air campaign in Gazawithin weeks and transition to more targeted operations against Hamas, Mr. Sullivan declined to publicly discuss a timetable, emphasizing that both the United States and Israel expected the pace of the fighting to ultimately slow down. But Israel has maintained that its operations could take “months.”
“When Israel launched this campaign to root out the terrorist threat that Hamas poses to the state of Israel, it made clear from the beginning that this war would proceed in phases,” Mr. Sullivan told reporters in Tel Aviv, where he was concluding two days of meetings with Israeli leaders. He added that the next phase of the conflict would be more focused on targeting Hamas’s senior leadership and on intelligence-driven operations, without elaborating on what those would be.
“There’s no contradiction,” Mr. Sullivan added, “between saying the fight is going to take months and also saying that different phases will take place at different times over those months, including the transition from the high-intensity operations to more targeted operations.”
Mr. Sullivan said the timing and the conditions under which the transition happens were the subject of conversations he had on Thursday and Friday with Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of hiswar cabinet.
“I think it’s really important that those conversations take place, first in the spirit of partnership,” Mr. Sullivan said. “We’re not here to tell anybody, ‘You must do X, you must do Y.’” Instead, Mr. Sullivan said, U.S. officials were discussing with Israeli officials the ways in which the United States believes Israel can ensure that Hamas does not continue to present a threat, while protecting the lives of Gazan civilians.
“We are laying out what we believe is the best course forward. We are doing that behind closed doors because we think that’s the best way to achieve convergence around an approach that satisfies those objectives,” Mr. Sullivan said.
The conversations around the timeline and conditions for a transition to more targeted operations also had to take place in private, Mr. Sullivan said, to avoid telegraphing plans to Hamas.
During their meetings in Israel on Thursday, Israeli leaders presented Mr. Sullivan with their own timeline for waging a more targeted offensive — one that was slower than the one favored by Mr. Biden and some of his advisers. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said before meeting with Mr. Sullivan on Thursday that the campaign against Hamas would last “more than several months.”
Mr. Biden said this week thatIsrael was starting to lose international supportbecause of its “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza, a much harsher assessment than his earlier public statements urging greater care to protect civilians. But White House officialshave declinedin the days since to repeat Mr. Biden’s characterization.
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Palestinians looking through debris at a destroyed residential building in Rafah, Gaza, on Friday.
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Hatem Ali/Associated Press
The Biden administration has found itself under pressure at home and abroad to rein in Israel, its closest Middle East ally, as the Palestinian death toll mounts.
Israel launched the war in retaliation for the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, Israeli officials say, and saw roughly 240 people taken hostage. Israel has responded with more than two months of bombardment and a ground invasion of Gaza that have killed nearly 20,000 people, according to the Gazan health ministry, and forced most of the territory’s 2.2 million people to flee their homes.
U.S. officials have emphasized the need for Israel to reduce civilian casualties and ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid as the United Nations warns of increasingly dire conditions in Gaza. Mr. Sullivan said Israeli leaders had told him that “their goal is to try to distinguish between innocent Palestinians and Hamas as we go forward.”
Later Friday, Mr. Sullivan met in the Israeli-occupied West Bank with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, amid widening differences with Israel over postwar scenarios for Gaza.
At his news conference, he repeated the American view that Israel should not reoccupy Gaza, from which it withdrew its forces in 2005.
The Biden administration’s urgings to wind down the heavy fighting have gained urgency as the war, now in its third month, threatens to spread in the region and possibly draw in other militant groups that, like Hamas, are supported by Iran.
The Israeli military and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s powerful Iranian-backed militant group, have exchanged cross-border strikes for weeks, prompting Israeli officials to hint at launching a more powerful response. And the Houthi militia in Yemen, which is also backed by Iran, has stepped up attacks against vessels in the Red Sea, a critical corridor for global shipping.
On Israel’s northern border, where missile and drone attacks by Hezbollah have forced civilians to evacuate their homes, Mr. Sullivan said that Israeli citizens had to be able to be able to return to their homes and feel secure doing so. But Mr. Sullivan said the United States believed “that threat can be dealt with through diplomacy and does not require the launching of a new war.”
Palestinian workers who were in Israel when the war broke out returned to the Gaza Strip last month through the Kerem Shalom crossing.
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Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Israel has decided to open one of its border crossings into the Gaza Strip for the delivery of humanitarian aid, the U.S. and Israeli governments said on Friday, after weeks of calls by aid groups to allow another route to operate.
In the first days of the war, Israel and Egypt sealed off Gaza completely. Since then, the only portal for food, water, medicine and fuel to reach the increasingly desperate people in the territory has been the Rafah border crossing from southern Gaza into Egypt.
But after meetings with Israeli leaders, Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, said on Friday that Israel would allow aid through the Kerem Shalom border post near the southernmost tip of Gaza. Kerem Shalom was the main commercial crossing between Israel and Gaza before the war, regularly handling hundreds of truckloads of imports and exports daily.
A statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office confirmed that the Israeli cabinet had “temporarily approved the unloading of the trucks on the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom.” It said that only humanitarian aid coming from Egypt, where international groups have established a staging area for aid delivery, would be allowed through.
It was not immediately clear when the opening would take place.
Israel closed all of its crossings with Gaza after Hamas launched the Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people and seized more than 240 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. Israel has retaliated with a punishing air and ground campaign on Gaza in which nearly 20,000 people have been killed, according to Gazan health authorities.
During the war, Israel has insisted on inspecting trucks carrying aid into Gaza, which it says is essential to bar the entry of weapons and supplies that Hamas could divert for military use. It has conducted the inspections at Nitzana, an Israeli village about 30 miles southeast of Rafah.
The United Nations and aid groups say that not nearly enough supplies are getting through to sustain Gaza’s besieged population, and say that part of the problem has been having just one crossing and forcing trucks to make a time-consuming trip to Nitzana for inspection.
The Biden administration has pressed Israel to increase the flow of aid, and Israel recently agreed to use the Kerem Shalom checkpoint, which is much closer to Rafah, for truck inspections. If the crossing is also used to let trucks enter Gaza — something that UNRWA, the U.N. agency that cares for Palestinians, has been calling for — it could ease the bottleneck.
Aid officials have warned ofextremeovercrowding and a dire situation in the Rafah border area and have raised alarms about the spread of disease. Most of Gaza’s roughly 2.2 million people have been displaced from their homes and have crowded into the southern part of the territory.
Soon after the Oct. 7 attack, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of Israel said that Gaza would receive “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” That came on top of a 16-year partial blockade imposed on the coastal territory.
Aaron Boxermancontributed reporting from Jerusalem.
Chen Goldstein-Almog, who, along with her three surviving children, was among the hostages released by Hamas in exchange for the release of prisoners by Israel in November.
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Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
The strangest part of her seven-week ordeal, said Chen Goldstein-Almog, formerly an Israeli hostage of Hamas, were the long, almost intimate conversations she had with her captors.
They talked about their families, their lives and the extreme danger they all faced.
One of the gunmen holding her even apologized for the killing of her husband and one of her daughters by other Hamas gunmen, she said.
“It was a mistake and against the Quran,” he told her, Ms. Goldstein-Almog remembered.
She said a long silence followed, and the room she and three of her children were being held in immediately filled with tension.
“I didn’t respond,” she said. She was distraught about their deaths, but at that moment, she said, “I didn’t feel I could express any negative feelings.”
Ms. Goldstein-Almog, 48, and the three children were kidnapped on Oct. 7 from the Kfar Aza kibbutz, near the border of Gaza and one of the worst hit during the Hamas terrorist attacks. Her husband and eldest daughter were killed.
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Buildings in Kfar Aza that were damaged during the attack on Oct. 7.
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Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
She and the surviving children — another daughter, Agam, 17, and two sons, Gal, 11, and Tal, 9 — were released in late November as part of the exchange of prisoners between Israel and Hamas that has since ceased.
In an interview this week, she shared details about her ordeal.
She said she and the children were held together, treated “respectfully” and not physically harmed. But she said that over the course of various moves during their captivity, she had met other hostages who were badly treated, including two women who said they were sexually abused.
Mostly, they were held in a room in an apartment in Gaza, she said, with the windows closed except for a bit of fresh air in the early mornings. But the heavily armed captors also moved Ms. Goldstein-Almog and her children to different apartments, tunnels, a mosque, even a destroyed supermarket, she said.
With the Israeli military pounding Gaza, each transfer was terrifying, and the men holding them, she said, didn’t always seem to know what to do.
Describing one move, she said: “It was the middle of the night. Everything was dark. They started deliberating among themselves. I could see the helplessness on their faces.”
“When we were out into the street, in total darkness, there was a shot above us,” she continued. “We were pressed against the wall, and I could see a laser pointer, as if we were being targeted from above.”
And she was thinking: That’s our air force up there.
“It was crazy,” she said, “this absurdity.”
Three of Ms. Goldstein-Almog's children, Agam, Tal and Gal, were kidnapped with her on Oct. 7 from the Kfar Aza kibbutz, one of the communities hit hardest in the Hamas-led terrorist attacks. Her husband and eldest daughter were killed.
Her conversations with her guards sometimes went on for hours, she said, maybe because she was once a social worker and knew how to keep someone in a long, deep conversation — her only way of trying to make sure, she said, that she and the children would be safe.
The guards taught her son Gal 250 words in Arabic to keep him occupied and brought him a notebook to study. She said the family and the guards regularly discussed what to eat. Most days they survived off pita bread with cheese, usually feta. In the early days there were also a few vegetables. She said the guards told her they were members of Hamas.
The lead guard seemed educated and spoke Hebrew, she said. In the apartment where they stayed the longest, he sometimes invited the family to join in cooking in the kitchen, though even in these moments, the guards carried pistols. The guards would escort them to the bathroom on request, and allowed them to sleep.
Each member of the family had emotional ups and downs. Sometimes they would talk about what happened on Oct. 7, or would realize no cease-fire was near. The captors didn’t like it when the children cried, she said. They asked immediately for them to stop.
“And if for a moment, I would sit and sink in my thoughts,” she said, the lead captor “would directly ask me what I was thinking. I couldn’t move from room to room without an armed guard accompanying me. Once, my two sons were arguing, and the guard raised his voice at one of them, which was scary.”
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Residents of Kfar Aza watching news about the release of hostages from their kibbutz, in Shefayim, Israel, last month.
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Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
There were even moments when the guards cried in front of them, she said, worried about their own families.
“We were in daily danger,” she said. “It was fear at a level we didn’t know existed.”
She couldn’t stop replaying thedeath of her husband, Nadav, 48, whom she started dating in high school and who was killed in front of their eyes along with their oldest daughter, Yam, 20, a soldier just two months from the end of her service.
At the end of their captivity, the lead guard turned to Ms. Goldstein-Almog and gave her a warning: Don’t go back to your kibbutz, he said. Don’t return to a place so close to Gaza. Go to Tel Aviv or somewhere farther north, she remembers him saying. Because we are coming back.
Ms. Goldstein-Almog’s response?
“Next time you come,” she said she told them, “don’t throw a grenade. Just knock on the door.”
Israeli forces recover the bodies of three hostages in Gaza.
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A picture of Elia Toledano being held by his brother at a vigil in Paris in October.
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Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA, via Shutterstock
The Israeli military said on Friday that it had retrieved the bodies oftwo 19-year-old soldiersanda 28-year-old event plannerwho were kidnapped during the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7 and held captive in Gaza.
The hostages were identified as Cpl. Nik Beiser, 19; Sgt. Ron Sherman, 19; and Elia Toledano, 28, who was a dual citizen of Israel and France. Medical officials, military rabbis and forensic experts carried out the identification procedure, according to the military.The military did not give details about how the three men died or where their remains were found.
“Our heart was murdered in Gaza,” Mr. Beiser’s mother, Katy Beiser, wrote in Hebrew on Facebook. “We won’t forget your smile.”
The two soldiers were taken hostage while serving in a base run by COGAT, Israel’s military body that oversees policy for the Palestinian territories. Mr. Toledano was kidnapped while attending the Tribe of Nova music festival in the Negev Desert, where Palestinian gunmen killed hundreds of people, the Times of Israel reported.
“We share in the family’s grief,” the military said in a statement, adding that its mission was “to locate the missing and return all the abductees home.”
According a The Times of Israel interview with Mr. Beiser’s mother, he was not supposed to be working on the weekend he was kidnapped, as he had switched shifts with a friend.
She last heard from him the morning of Oct. 7, when he tried to calm her down after she called him. He told her not to worry before his phone disconnected. Later that afternoon, she saw her son in a video posted online by Hamas.
Mr. Sherman’s father, Alex Sherman, said that his son was a very social person — “a magnet to everyone around him” — who enjoyed playing soccer with his friends in the military. He also was asthmatic, he said, and used an inhaler. His last telephone conversation with him was the morning of Oct. 7.
“He sounded very frightened and was describing what he could hear, minute after minute, then he said there were terrorists in the base,” he said in a video message posted by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group of families of hostages held in Gaza.
Before Mr. Sherman lost touch with his family at 7:12 a.m., he wrote in a text: “That’s it, they’re by the door. This is the end, I’m a goner, I love you,” along with red hearts.
His father said that a video of Mr. Sherman with two other soldiers was posted by Hamas four or five hours after their phone call.The family have any news about Sergeant Sherman after that, his father said in a video posted by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum in mid-November.
President Emmanuel Macron of France confirmed the death of Mr. Toledano, who had French citizenship, on social media.No other details about Mr. Toledano’s death were immediately available.
“Our compatriot Elia Toledano was taken on Oct. 7 by Hamas,” Mr. Macron wrote. “Deep sadness this morning of his death in Gaza. I share in the shock and sorrow of his family.”
Ephrat Livnicontributed reporting.
A correction was made on
Dec. 15, 2023
:
An earlier version of this item misidentified where the two abducted soldiers had been serving. They were in a base run by COGAT, an Israeli military body, not the Gaza Police Headquarters.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know atnytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Israelis press the Red Cross to help hostages in Gaza.
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Medical aid delivered by the International Committee of the Red Cross at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, last week.
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Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The International Committee of the Red Cross is under mounting pressure from Israelis and their government to do more to persuade Hamas to let aid workers and medics have access to hostages kidnapped in the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.
Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the I.C.R.C., traveled to Israel on Thursday to meet with Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and to speak with the families of hostages. A statement from Red Cross organization said Ms. Spoljaric hoped to listen to the families’ concerns and “to share with them the I.C.R.C.’s relentless efforts to gain access to” the hostages.
In adiscussion posted on YouTubebetween Ms. Spoljaric and Mr. Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister echoed a sentiment expressed widely in Israel — most vociferously by relatives of hostages — that the aid organization must try harder tofulfill its missionto ensure humanitarian assistance for victims of armed conflict and to help the captives.
Mr. Netanyahu urged Ms. Spoljaric to put public pressure on Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that governs Gaza, but she did not agree with the proposed tactic.
“It’s not going to work because the more public pressure we seemingly would do, the more they would shut the door,”Ms. Spoljaric said.
Israelis and some in the international community have criticized the Red Cross organization because it had not publicly condemned Hamas’s actions on Oct. 7. But the I.C.R.C. said that was in keeping with its mission to remain neutral, according to a post on its website that it said was intended to debunk “harmful narratives” about its work.
“To some, it may seem as if we are not outspoken enough,” the statement said. “But based on decades of experience, we believe that advocating discreetly and constantly with those we are trying to influence is the most effective approach.”
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group formed by relatives of the captives after the Oct. 7 attack, has beenvocal about its disappointmentin the I.C.R.C. Before Ms. Spoljaric’s visit to Israel, eight former hostages and more than 100 families of those held captive wrote to the organization todenounce its inaction.
Avideo by the group— entitled “Red Cross: What have you been up to?” — calls out the organization for failing to deliver medicine, provide treatment or visit hostages and urges action. It is one of manyvideoscreated by the forum to put pressure on the I.C.R.C.
Some of the criticism has come from outside Israel. On Wednesday, the American Jewish women’s group Hadassah sent a letter to the group denouncing its failure to demand assurances about the captives and secure access to them.
“It is appalling that the I.C.R.C. has left those kidnapped by Hamas to languish without the care and intervention the Red Cross affords all other detainees around the world,” Hadassah’s president, Rhoda Smolow, saidin a statement. “From one humanitarian organization to another, we implore the I.C.R.C. to take action.”
Since the war began, officials from Qatar, Egypt and the United States have brokered deals between Israel and Hamas that called for the exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian women and teens held in Israeli jails. Aspart of those deals, the I.C.R.C. hashelped return more than 100hostages safely to Israel.
But more than 100 hostages are still being held in Gaza, and accounts of harrowing conditions of detention from those who have been released have only confirmed the families’ concerns about the remaining kidnapping victims.
The I.C.R.C. and Hostages and Missing Families Forum did not respond to requests for comment on their meeting. On Friday, Ms. Spoljaricposted on social mediathat she was traveling to the West Bank to meet with Palestinian leaders and a committee for detainee affairs that has helped Palestinians detained in Israel.
As Israel weighs how to honor Oct. 7 victims, a festival exhibit becomes a ‘hallowed space.’
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The “Nova 6.29” exhibition in Tel Aviv recreates the essence of the Israeli trance festival where the Hamas-led attacks killed hundreds of people on Oct. 7.
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Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
A backgammon set suspended midgame. Tents and folding picnic chairs dotted among the trees. A psychedelic dance floor with downtempo and chillout trance playing in the background as video screens show images of flushed, ecstatic young people moving to a silent beat.
The items, salvaged from the Oct. 7 “Tribe of Nova”trance festivalat Re’im in southern Israel, are part of a new installation in a huge hangar at Tel Aviv’s exhibition grounds that recreates some of the essence of an event that was dedicated to peace and love but was shut down by barrages of rocket fire from Gaza.
In the horror that followed, hundreds of Hamas gunmen surged across the border and surrounded the music festival, ambushing people in their cars along the road and hunting them down as they fled across fields. At least 360 festivalgoers were slain that day, according to the Israeli authorities — nearly a third of the total killed in the Hamas-led assault. Others were taken to Gaza and are still being held hostage there.
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Portraits of some of the victims of the Oct. 7 attack on the Nova festival are displayed in the exhibition.
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Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
The exhibit, which opened to the public for two weeks on Dec. 7, is titled “Nova 6.29” — for the moment, that morning around sunrise, when the music stopped.
“It shows the idea behind the community of Nova and tells the story of 6:29, when light turned to darkness,” said Yoni Feingold, an Israeli entertainment mogul and an initiator of the project. “It is a vast memorial for the nearly 400 who were killed.”
The installation is one of the first physical memorials of the events of Oct. 7. Israelis are only beginning to think about how to commemorate the victims of that Saturday, the deadliest day in Israel’s 75-year history.
Some people are talking about preserving, as a kind of museum, the charred ruins of neighborhoods in border communities that came under attack. Several organizations are gathering testimony from survivors.
The country has not yet held an official day of national mourning, having gone straight to war against Hamas in Gaza.
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Destroyed items from the festival site that are included in the exhibition.
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Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
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Bullet holes on portable toilets from the music festival.
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Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
In one corner of the hall, yellow portable toilet cubicles are lined up, the bottom halves of some of the doors riddled with bullet holes. Nearby, a jumble of incinerated cars.
At the opening of the exhibition, the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, described it as “a hallowed space.”
“The fragments of the party and the torn pieces of life lie here now as a silent testimony, in memory of all the tremendous human beauty that was lost,” he said, adding, “The massacre, and the deep and painful wound it created, are the legacy of an entire generation.”
Proceeds from the exhibit, which is expected to remain in Tel Aviv for a few weeks, will go to help survivors and families of those killed.
“We are looking ahead,” said Raz Malka, 27, a member of the Nova production team who survived the attack. “The terrorists came to degrade and murder people who were there having the time of their lives,” he said, adding: “We will dance again” — the new motto of the Nova team.
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The festival objects “lie here now as a silent testimony, in memory of all the tremendous human beauty that was lost,” said President Isaac Herzog of Israel.
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Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
The festival’s main stage is now set up in the exhibition hall and etched with the names of the production staff who built it, stayed to dismantle it when the rocket fire began and were killed. A second stage nearby — of the Mushroom Project, which played Goa trance, a style that originated in India — was produced by twin brothers, Osher and Michael Vaknin, 35, from Jerusalem. They, too, were killed.
Tables labeled “Lost and Found” are laden with belongings retrieved from the site: rows of shoes; eyeglasses and sunglasses; bags and pouches; toiletries; car and house keys.
Video of people dancing in their last moments is interspersed with screenshots of WhatsApp exchanges from that day, capturing the fear and terror as people tried to flee and hide. Another rolling screen displays portraits of those who never made it home.
Idit Shachal, who was visiting the exhibit on a recent weekday, said she had “come to see and understand.” Her son, Nadav, 24, had survived the rave after fleeing for eight hours on foot with a friend until they found refuge in a village nearly 10 miles away.
“My heart aches,” Ms. Shachal said, glancing at the burned cars. “The thought that all these things are from there.”
Women holding signs written in Arabic, Hebrew and English at a peace protest in Tel Aviv on Friday.
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Adam Sella for The New York Times
Wearing all white, they sat silently in a circle on a public plaza in Tel Aviv — dozens of women, Jewish and Palestinian, holding up signs with pro-peace slogans written in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
It was a rare protest in Israel calling for an end to the war in Gaza, which has broad popular support among the country’s Jewish majority. Yahav Erez, a demonstrator from Tel Aviv, said: “It’s safe to say, people want the killing to stop.”
With tensions high over the war, the women’s protest was an unusual public collaboration between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian citizens of the country.
“Joint activism is crucial because it brings about a more just solution for everyone,” said Miar Sliman, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who drove over an hour from Akko, in northern Israel, for the demonstration.
A small crowd gathered around the protest circle, and from time to time a heckler called out at them, dismissing the idea of peace. The protesters demanded a political agreement, such as a two-state solution, saying that only a negotiated agreement that ensures security for both sides could bring an end to the cycles of violence between Israel and the Palestinians.
“At the end of the day, there are 14 million people here who need to live together,” said Alma Beck, a demonstrator from Tel Aviv, referring to the combined population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Ms. Beck said that her dream is to sit with the women journalists from Gaza she follows on Instagram, “that they will be my friends and that we will build a new reality together.”
Several people have been arrested in Iraq on charges they participated in a mortar attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad last week, the prime minister’s office announced Thursday, and officials said some were members of a Shiite armed group that is part of Iraq’s security forces.
The prime minister, Mohammed Shia al Sudani, issued a sharply worded statement — his strongest to date that pointed to armed factions close to Iran that are part of his government — suggesting that those involved in the attack had crossed a red line by targeting a diplomatic mission and had put Iraq’s standing on the international stage at risk.
Attacks by Iran-linked groups across the region, targeting Israel or the United States, have increased dramatically during the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza and is also allied with Iran. Almost 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, the vast majority civilians, according to health officials there.
There have been more than 80 attacks on U.S. installations in Iraq and Syria since Oct. 17, when Iran-linked groups in Iraq began their drone and rocket attacks. But, with the exception of the Dec. 8 attack against the U.S. embassy, the Iran-linked groups have targeted military bases or camps. No one has been killed in any of the incidents, but more than 60 military personnel have suffered injuries, according to the Pentagon.
Calling the mortar strike at the embassy “an attack on the security and sovereignty of Iraq,” Mr. al Sudani said the attack had done “damage to Iraq’s reputation and dignity, raising questions about its credibility as a sovereign state capable of fulfilling international obligations.”
The last time that militants targeted the U.S. embassy compound was in 2022.
The prime minister did not name the factions involved, but at least one is the prominent Shiite armed group, Khataib al Hezbollah, according to Iraqi security officials. Three of those arrested belong to Khataib Hezbollah, the officials said, and several other security force members are also in detention.
Khataib Hezbollah is part of the official Iraqi security apparatus, but it is also closely linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and has a large base of operations south of Baghdad, where it builds and stores weapons that it uses against U.S. forces and transports to Syria and the rest of the region.
The irony that one or more elements in Iraq’s own security forces fired on the U.S. Embassy when the United States is in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government was not lost on Mr. Sudani. “Unfortunately, preliminary information indicates that some of them are connected to certain security services,” the prime minister said.
The U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Alina Romanowski, issued a statement on social media commending the prime minister, the Iraqi security services, and the judiciary for “successfully apprehending a number of those responsible for the terrorist attacks against our Embassy.”
She urged the government to bring the perpetrators to justice.
In the past, when members of Iran-linked groups have been arrested, they have often been released without charge. For now, the suspects are in jail and a search is ongoing for others involved in the attack.
Israeli ground forces have damaged or destroyed at least six cemeteries during their advance into the northern Gaza Strip, most of them in recent weeks, according to an analysis of new satellite imagery and video footage by The New York Times.
A team of political rivals joined together to fight Hamas in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet. But beneath the veneer of unity, there are political differences and old resentments.
A day after President Biden voiced his strongest criticism of the Israeli government since the war began, some Israelis were suggesting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might seek political benefit from escalating a fight with the American leader.
Read More
Rules of War: Proportionality, a key concept in determining the legality of an act of war, is about weighing civilian harm against military objectives. But a lack of consensus on how to make such a comparison leaves room for questions about civilian deaths in Gaza.
Hostage Account: A Thai farmworker clung to hope during her nearly 50 days of captivity in Gaza by befriending a young Israeli girl and dreaming of reuniting with her boyfriend, who had also been abducted.
Evacuation Decrees: For the many Gazans without phones or internet access, navigating Israel’s evacuation orders is proving challenging. Those who are able to get to the information say the directives are at times bewildering and contradictory.
A Ravaged Border Community: Kibbutz Kfar Aza was devastated in the Hamas-led assault of Oct. 7, with its residents killed and kidnapped. Some see the prospects of the kibbutz’s rehabilitation as a barometer for Israel’s future.
