Gaza:

Israel announced Sunday its troops had found six dead hostages in a Gaza tunnel, as Israeli police said a “shooting attack” in the occupied West Bank killed three officers.

The deadly shooting near Hebron added to surging violence in the West Bank, which is separated from Gaza by Israeli territory and where Israel has since Wednesday carried out a large-scale military operation that has sparked international concern.

In the besieged Gaza Strip, “humanitarian pauses” in the nearly 11-month war between Israel and Hamas were set to take place to facilitate a massive polio vaccination drive which a health official told AFP had begun.

Israel’s military said the remains of six hostages were recovered Saturday “from an underground tunnel in the Rafah area” in southern Gaza and formally identified in Israel.

The were named as Carmel Gat, who was taken from a kibbutz community near the Gaza border, as well as Eden Yerushalmi, Almog Sarusi, Ori Danino, US-Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Russian-Israeli Alexander Lobanov, who were seized by Palestinian operatives from a music festival site.

Military spokesman Daniel Hagari said all six “were abducted alive on the morning of October 7” and “brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists shortly before we reached them”.

US President Joe Biden said he was “devastated and outraged” by their deaths, but told reporters he was “still optimistic” a Gaza truce and hostage release deal can be reached.

“It’s time this war ended,” said Biden, whose administration has been involved in ceasefire mediation efforts along with Qatar and Egypt.

EU top diplomat Josep Borrell said he was “horrified at the murder” of the hostages, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressed shock at their “senseless” killing.

The six were among 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s October 7 attack that triggered the ongoing war, 97 of whom remain captive in Gaza including 33 the army says are dead. Scores were released during a negotiated one-week truce in November.

Campaign group the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said a negotiated “deal for the return of the hostages” was urgently needed.

“Were it not for the delays, sabotage and excuses” in months of mediation efforts, the six hostages “would likely still be alive”.

The families called for a nationwide general strike from Sunday night to force the government to reach a deal to secure the release of those still held.

A senior Hamas official told AFP on condition of anonymity that “some” of the six had been “approved” for release in a potential hostage-prisoner swap as part of a deal yet to be agreed.

‘Request forgiveness’

Critics in Israel have accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of prolonging the war for political gain.

Speaking to Lobanov’s parents on Sunday, Netanyahu said: “I would like to tell you how much I regret and request forgiveness for not succeeding in bringing Sasha back alive.”

Qatar-based Hamas official Izzat al-Rishq said the six were “killed by Zionist (Israeli) bombing”, an accusation the military denied.

Netanyahu blamed Hamas leaders “who kill hostages and do not want an agreement”, vowing to “settle the score” with them.

Hamas’s October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Israel’s offensive has killed at least 40,738 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN rights office says most of the dead are women and children.

The fighting has devastated Gaza, repeatedly displaced most of its 2.4 million people and triggered a humanitarian crisis. Water, sanitation and medical facilities have been ravaged, contributing to the spread of preventable disease.

After the first confirmed polio case in 25 years, a Gaza health official said vaccinations began Saturday ahead of a wider campaign.

The World Health Organization has said Israel agreed to a series of three-day “humanitarian pauses” to facilitate the campaign that aims to reach some 640,000 children.

On Sunday, it was formally launched at three health centres in central Gaza, said Yasser Shaaban, director of Al-Awda hospital.

“We hope this vaccination campaign for children will be calm,” said Shaaban, noting there were “a lot of drones” flying overhead.

Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, later said nearly 2,000 children were vaccinated initially Sunday.

But she added that they were anxious about later: “If the bombing continues after 2:00 pm this is of course going to impact the vaccination campaign… The only way to do this is a ceasefire.”

Wateridge later reported a strike in the Nuseirat area.

The civil defence agency said an Israeli air strike killed two people in Gaza City further north, where an AFP correspondent also reported shelling early Sunday.

West Bank violence

Israeli forces and Palestinian operatives were battling in the West Bank Sunday, five days into major coordinated raids Israel’s military has described as “counter-terrorism” operations.

A “shooting attack” near Tarqumiya checkpoint in the Hebron area in the southern West Bank killed three people on Sunday, Israel’s emergency medical service said. The police said they were all members of the force.

The military said several assailants may have been involved.

In the northern West Bank, an AFP photographer saw Israeli bulldozers in Jenin’s city centre, a day after a local official said soldiers had destroyed most of the streets and power and water had been cut off in the adjacent refugee camp.

At least 22 Palestinians, including 14 claimed by operative groups, have been killed by the Israeli military since the start on Wednesday of simultaneous raids across the northern West Bank.

A 20-year-old soldier was killed Saturday.

The United Nations said Wednesday that at least 637 Palestinians had been killed in the territory by Israeli troops or settlers since the Gaza war began.

Twenty-three Israelis, including soldiers, have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during army operations over the same period, according to official figures.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Jerusalem:

The Israeli military said on Wednesday it had “failed” in its response to a settler attack in the occupied West Bank earlier this month that Palestinian officials said killed one man.

The August 15 raid on the northern West Bank village of Jit came amid soaring violence in the Palestinian territory during the Gaza war and growing international concern over an uptick in attacks by Jewish settlers.

Major General Avi Bluth, head of the military’s Central Command which operates in the West Bank, was quoted in a statement as saying the attack was “a very serious terror incident in which Israelis set out to deliberately harm the residents of the town of Jit, and we failed by not succeeding to arrive earlier to protect them”.

Jit residents have said about 100 settlers armed with knives and firearms set fire to cars and homes in the village. 

The military, releasing on Wednesday a summary of its investigation, said the group wore masks, threw rocks and Molotov cocktails and set three vehicles and two buildings on fire.

The Palestinian health ministry said a 23-year-old Palestinian man, Rashid Sada, was shot dead in the attack.

Last week, Israeli police and the Shin Bet internal security service said they had arrested four suspects for “terrorist” acts in connection with the incident.

The military’s investigation found that the first troops at the scene “did not manage to fully gauge the situation” and “needed to act more decisively”, the statement said.

“Several members of the rapid response team from a nearby (settlement) community, who were not in active reserve duty, arrived at the scene without authorisation, dressed in uniform, and acted contrary to the authority defined for the members of the rapid response team,” it added without elaborating.

Two members of the team “were dismissed, and their weapons were confiscated”, it said.

The statement said the shooting that killed Sada and wounded another Palestinian occurred before more Israeli forces managed to disperse the assailants.

“The troops acted assertively, risking their lives, containing the rioters, and pushing them out of the town using crowd dispersal means and firing into the air,” the statement said.

“Half an hour after the incident began, all Israelis were removed from the town.”

Bluth was quoted as saying the case “will not be closed until we bring the perpetrators to justice”.

Rising violence

Israeli President Isaac Herzog “firmly” condemned the attack on Jit when it occurred.

Since Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel triggered war in Gaza, violence has flared in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967 and separated geographically from Gaza by Israeli territory.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank, where some 490,000 people live, are illegal under international law. The United Nations considers them an obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace.

On Wednesday Washington announced new sanctions on Israeli settlers in the West Bank over violence against Palestinians, urging Israel to bring greater accountability.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday that he viewed the sanctions “with utmost severity” and that they were the subject of “pointed discussion” with the US.

Since October 7, at least 660 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli troops or settlers, according to an AFP count based on Palestinian official figures.

During the same period, at least 19 Israelis, including soldiers, have been killed in Palestinian attacks, according to Israeli official figures.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Mourners carry the body of 13-year-old Palestinian Ayham Shafi’e who was killed in an Israeli raid, in Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank November 2, 2023.
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Three Palestinians were killed Thursday by Israeli fire in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said, and an Israeli was killed in a Palestinian shooting attack, according to first responders.

Violence has surged across the West Bank for months and intensified further since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, triggered by the Palestinian militant group’s unprecedented attack on Israeli soil on October 7.

On Thursday in El-Bireh, near the seat of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, two Palestinians, Ayham al-Shafei, 14 and Yazan Shiha, 24, were killed and two others wounded when Israeli troops opened fire during a raid, the Palestinian health ministry said.

A 19-year-old Palestinian, Qusai Quran, was killed by Israeli forces during a raid on Qalqilya in the northern West Bank, according to the ministry, reporting two others were wounded.

The Israeli army did not immediately comment on the incidents.

Elsewhere, an Israeli was killed after his car came under fire near the settlement of Einav, said Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency response organisation.

Israeli officials have not identified the fatality.

The army said in a statement it “has set up roadblocks in the area and is hunting down the terrorists” behind the alleged shooting near the Palestinian city of Tulkarm in the northern West Bank.

After the Israeli man’s death, dozens of settlers stormed the Palestinian village of Dayr Sharaf, located about seven kilometres (four miles) from the Einav settlement, an AFP correspondent said.

The correspondent saw Israelis setting Palestinian businesses and fields ablaze and smashing empty cars.

Also on Thursday, the Palestinian health ministry reported the death of 14-year-old Hamdan Hamdan of wounds sustained Monday by Israeli fire in a village near Nablus.

For several months, the West Bank has seen increasing Israeli army raids, attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers and Palestinian assaults against Israeli settlers and security forces.

According to the Palestinian ministry, Israeli forces and settlers have killed around 130 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7.

In the same period around 1,900 have been arrested by Israeli security forces, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club advocacy group.

Some media and rights organisations have said videos circulating on social media show Israeli soldiers filming the abuse and humiliation of detained Palestinians.

In a statement this week, Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said it “has documented severe abuse and torture against Palestinian civilians and detainees at the hands of the Israeli army”.

The NGO said Palestinians near Hebron in the south of the West Bank had been “dragged and assaulted by Israeli soldiers”.

“The Palestinian civilians in the footage have been stripped of their clothes, have their hands and feet tied, and appear to have been left outdoors for hours at a time,” the statement said.

The United States warned on Wednesday that violence by settlers in the West Bank was “incredibly destabilising”.

A State Department spokesman called settler violence “counterproductive to Israel’s long-term security” and said Washington had been clear with Israel that it “needs to stop”.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and its forces regularly carry out raids on Palestinian militants there.

Israeli officials say the Hamas attacks have killed more than 1,400 people in Israel, most of them civilians.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says Israeli bombardments have killed more than 9,000 people, also mostly civilians, in the besieged Palestinian territory.

Tamir Pardo, former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, in Herzliya, Israel, on September 6, 2023. He said that Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank, joining a small but growing list of retired officials to endorse an idea that remains largely on the fringes of Israeli discourse.
| Photo Credit: AP

A former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank, joining a tiny but growing list of retired officials to endorse an idea that remains largely on the fringes of Israeli discourse and international diplomacy.

Tamir Pardo becomes the latest former senior official to have concluded that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank amounts to apartheid, a reference to the system of racial separation in South Africa that ended in 1994.

Leading rights groups in Israel and abroad and Palestinians have accused Israel and its 56-year occupation of the West Bank of morphing into an apartheid system that they say gives Palestinians second-class status and is designed to maintain Jewish hegemony from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

A handful of former Israeli leaders, diplomats and security men have warned that Israel risks becoming an apartheid state, but Mr. Pardo’s language was even more blunt.

“There is an apartheid state here,” Tamir Pardo said in an interview. “In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”

Given Mr. Pardo’s background, the comments carry special weight in security-obsessed Israel.

Mr. Pardo, who was appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and served as head of Israel’s clandestine spy agency from 2011-2016, wouldn’t say if he held the same beliefs while heading the Mossad. But he said that he believed among the country’s most pressing issues was the Palestinians — above Iran’s nuclear program, seen by Mr. Netanyahu as an existential threat.

Mr. Pardo said that as Mossad chief, he repeatedly warned Mr. Netanyahu that he needed to decide what Israel’s borders were, or risk the destruction of a state for the Jews.

In the past year, Mr. Pardo has become an outspoken critic against Mr. Netanyahu and his government’s push to reshape the judicial system, slamming his old boss for steps he said would lead Israel to become a dictatorship. His candid evaluation Wednesday of Israel’s military occupation is rare among leaders of the grassroots protest movement against the judicial overhaul, which has largely avoided talk of the occupation out of concern that it might scare away more nationalist supporters.

Mr. Pardo’s remarks, and the overhaul, come as Israel’s far-right government, which is made up of ultranationalist parties who support annexing the West Bank, is working to entrench Israel’s hold on the territory. Some ministers have pledged to double the number of settlers currently living in the West Bank, which stands at a half-million.

Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party issued a statement condemning Mr. Pardo’s comments. “Instead of defending Israel and the Israeli military, Pardo slanders Israel,” it said. “Pardo. You should be ashamed.”

In apartheid South Africa, a system based on white supremacy and racial segregation was in place from 1948 until 1994. Human rights groups have based their conclusions on Israel on international conventions like the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It defines apartheid as “an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group.”

Mr. Pardo said Israeli citizens can get into a car and drive wherever they want, excluding the blockaded Gaza Strip, but that Palestinians can’t drive everywhere. He said that his views on the system in the West Bank were “not extreme. It’s a fact.”

Israelis are barred from entering Palestinian areas of the West Bank, but can drive across Israel and throughout the 60% of the West Bank that Israel controls. Palestinians need permission from Israel to enter the country and often must pass through military checkpoints to move within the West Bank.

Rights groups point to discriminatory policies within Israel and in annexed east Jerusalem, Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has been ruled by the Hamas militant group since 2007, and its occupation of the West Bank. Israel exerts overall control of the territory, maintains a two-tier legal system and is building and expanding Jewish settlements that most of the international community considers illegal.

Israel rejects any allegation of apartheid and says its own Arab citizens enjoy equal rights. Israel granted limited autonomy to the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, at the height of the peace process in the 1990s and withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005. It says the West Bank is disputed territory and that its fate should be determined in negotiations.

Mr. Pardo warned that if Israel doesn’t set borders between it and the Palestinians, Israel’s existence as a Jewish state will be in danger.

Experts predict Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel plus the areas it captured in 1967 — the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. Continued occupation could force Israel into a hard choice: Formalize Jewish minority rule over disenfranchised Palestinians — or give them the right to vote and potentially end the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine.

“Israel needs to decide what it wants. A country that has no border has no boundaries,” Mr. Pardo said.