Adam Sella
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Sunday to keep fighting in Gaza, even as anguish over the Israeli military’s accidental killings of three hostages in the enclave raised new questions about how his government is prosecuting the war.
Amid a mounting outcry over the civilian toll in Gaza, the U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, is traveling to the Middle East this week. Mr. Austin is expected to voice support for Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza but also to reinforce the importance of taking civilian safety into account during operations, according to a senior Pentagon official said.
Mr. Netanyahu began a government meeting in Tel Aviv on Sunday by reading from a letter that he said came from families of Israeli soldiers killed fighting in Gaza.
“You have a mandate to fight; you do not have a mandate to stop in the middle,” Mr. Netanyahu read in Hebrew, according to a statement from his office.
As a “testament” to the fallen soldiers, Mr. Netanyahu said, Israel’s military would “fight to the end.”
The letter appears at odds with the message coming from relatives of Israelis still held hostage in Gaza, many of whom have taken to the streets to demand a cease-fire so that their loved ones can return home.
Weekly rallies in support of the hostages have drawn thousands of protesters to Tel Aviv to demonstrate outside the Israeli military’s main headquarters. News that the Israeli military had mistakenly killed the three hostages on Friday added a sense of urgency to the rally on Saturday night.
Hundreds of protesters gathered on a central boulevard in Tel Aviv to demonstrate against the government before marching through the city to join the hostage rally.
“We see the current approach is not working,” said Deborah Galili, a protester from Tel Aviv. She said she wanted Mr. Netanyahu’s government to pursue a peaceful resolution that would bring the hostages home and end the fighting.
A weeklong cease-fire between Israel and Hamas last month saw 105 hostages freed in exchange for the release of Palestinians from Israeli jails before negotiations broke down and the war resumed on Dec. 1.
But since then, Ms. Galili said, “we’re not seeing more hostages coming home alive.” Several hostages have been confirmed dead by Israel’s military in recent weeks.
Ahal Besorai’s niece and nephew were among those released during the pause, but their father — Mr. Besorai’s brother-in-law — remains in captivity. Mr. Besorai said in a phone interview on Sunday that he understood why people were demanding a cease-fire, especially after the deaths of three hostages, but worried that only military pressure will bring the rest of his family home.
“It’s a very, very, very, difficult spot because on the one hand, you want your loved one to be released, and on the other hand, you want Hamas eliminated,” said Mr. Besorai, whose sister was killed in the Oct. 7 attacks, which left roughly 1,200 dead and 240 taken hostage, according to Israeli officials. “These two aims and goals of this war appear at times in conflict.”
Some protesters at Saturday’s rally said that they believed the accidental killings of the three hostages by Israel’s military would mark a turning point in people’s willingness to publicly criticize Mr. Netanyahu and the way his government is handling the war.
Ms. Galili was one of them.
“Mr. Netanyahu has not taken responsibility,” she said, adding that he needs to “step up” and take responsibility or step down.
Efi Toledano, another demonstrator from Tel Aviv, had protested Mr. Netanyahu’s government before the war. While he stopped in wake of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the deaths of the hostages prompted him to resume protesting on Saturday night.
“We were taught that when there’s a war, we are all to be quiet and support the soldiers,” said Mr. Toledano. He said that the deaths of hostages suggested that Mr. Netanyahu might be interested in continuing the war even at the expense of hostages’ lives. Because of that, he added, “We are returning to sound our voice and fight against this government.”
A correction was made on
Dec. 17, 2023:
An earlier version of this post misstated the nationalities of the 105 hostages freed. They were not all Israelis.
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Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III will be in Israel, Bahrain and Qatar this week.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III was traveling on Sunday in the Middle East for a visit to Israel and three Persian Gulf nations as Biden administration officials push Israel to end its large-scale ground and air campaign in the Gaza Strip within weeks and transition to a more focused phase in its war against Hamas.
Mr. Austin will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, to discuss in detail when and how Israeli forces will carry out a new phase that American officials envision would involve smaller groups of elite forces, U.S. officials said. Those forces would move in and out of population centers in Gaza, conducting more precise, intelligence-driven missions to find and kill Hamas leaders, rescue hostages and destroy tunnels, according to the U.S. officials.
While the secretary is expected to voice support for Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas’s ability to wage military operations, he will also reinforce the importance of taking civilian safety into account during operations and the critical need to increase delivery of humanitarian assistance, a senior Pentagon official said.
As a former four-star head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, Mr. Austin is deeply familiar with the painful lessons the American armed forces learned in the past two decades as they transitioned from major ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to more targeted operations, and wants to share those lessons with Israeli officials, the Pentagon official said on condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments.
In a sign of the urgency of this moment in the war, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will join Mr. Austin in Israel.
Ten weeks after Hamas’s initial attack on Israel, the death toll in the Gaza Strip has climbed to nearly 20,000, according to local health officials, and international rights groups warn the humanitarian crisis there is spiraling even further. And the peril faced by the people kidnapped by Hamas and other armed groups — there are believed to be at least 100 individuals still being held captive — was evident on Friday, when Israeli forces mistakenly killed three Israeli hostages.
Mr. Austin’s visit, his second to Israel since Hamas killed about 1,200 people there on Oct. 7, is part of a full-court press by the administration to urge Israel to wrap up the high-intensity part of the war. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, met with Israeli leaders on Thursday about the direction of the conflict. Mr. Sullivan did not specify a timetable, but U.S. officials said Mr. Biden wants Israel to switch to more precise tactics in about three weeks.
The secretary made an unscheduled stop in Kuwait on Sunday evening to pay respects to the country’s emir, Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, whose death was announced on Saturday. He will also travel to Bahrain, home of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, largely to discuss freedom of navigation and maritime security in the region. The United States is in discussions with its allies to expand a maritime task force to guard ships traveling through the Red Sea after several recent attacks by Houthi rebels on commercial vessels in what appears to be an escalating extension of Israel’s war with Hamas by Iranian-sponsored proxy forces.
Mr. Austin will also visit Qatar, where the Pentagon operates a major command center at Al Udeid air base. Mr. Austin will meet with senior Qatari officials who have played an important role in facilitating the release of hostages seized by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7.
Finally, the secretary is expected to visit briefly with the crew of the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford, which was dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean Sea near Israel in the days after the Hamas attack as the first of two U.S. carriers sent to the region to deter Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq from widening the war in Gaza.
The Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Family in Gaza in 2020.
Roman Catholic church officials said an Israeli military sniper shot and killed a mother and daughter on Saturday inside a church compound in northern Gaza where many Palestinian Christian families have taken refuge.
The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said that “one was killed as she tried to carry the other to safety” in the compound of the Holy Family Church in Gaza City. Seven more people were shot and wounded while trying to protect others there, the patriarchate said in a statement on Saturday.
“No warning was given, no notification was provided,” the patriarchate said. “They were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the parish.”
The patriarchate said Israeli rockets were fired at a convent in the church compound earlier on Saturday, destroying the building’s sole generator and fuel supply and heavily damaging the structure. Fifty-four disabled people had been living in the convent, and some were left without working respirators that they need to survive, the statement said.
The Israeli military has denied knowledge of an attack at the Holy Family Parish.
Pope Francis condemned the killings on Sunday in his weekly address, saying that he continued to receive “very serious and sad news about Gaza.”
“Unarmed civilians are targets for bombs and gunfire,” the pope said. “And this has happened even within the parish complex of the Holy Family, where there are no terrorists, but families, children, people who are sick and have disabilities, sisters.”
The pope identified the two who were killed as Nahida Khalil Anton and her daughter Samar Kamal Anton. He said they and the others who were shot had been on their way to use a bathroom.
Layla Moran, a member of Britain’s Parliament, said in an interview on Sunday that members of her extended family across three generations — a grandmother, her son, his wife and their 11-year-old twins — were among hundreds of Christian Palestinians taking shelter at the Holy Family parish compound, which also includes a school and a rectory.
The compound has seen a “huge escalation” in gunfire since Tuesday, with no warning from the Israeli military, Ms. Moran said. Families at the church have remained trapped in schoolrooms with dwindling supplies of food and water, she said, adding that she was afraid her relatives there might not survive until Christmas.
The dire humanitarian situation at the church and the killing of the two women on Saturday “makes a mockery of the suggestion” that the Israeli military tries to keep civilians safe, she said.
Ms. Moran said a sixth member of her family who was sheltering at the church, the 81-year-old grandfather of the twins, died after he became dehydrated and could not be taken to a hospital, because nearly every health care facility in northern Gaza had stopped functioning.
The family sought refuge in the church during the first week of the war after their home in Gaza City was bombed, she said.
“Nowhere is safe in Gaza,” she said. “So they took the decision to stay in their church — with the people they knew, with the priests — thinking that they would be safe in the church. Who would attack a church?”
In October, an Israeli airstrike hit a Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza City. The Gazan health ministry said at least 16 people were killed and many others were buried underneath rubble. The Israeli military said that the church, which like Holy Family was sheltering displaced families, was “unequivocally” not the intended target of the strike, and that fighter jets were aiming for a Hamas command center nearby.
Nick Cumming-Bruce, Rachel Abrams and Jonathan Reiss contributed reporting.
Relatives and friends of Alon Shamriz, one of the hostages mistakenly killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip, mourned at his funeral in Shefayim on Sunday.
The three Israeli hostages who were mistakenly killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip on Friday appeared to have used leftover food to create signs calling for help, Israel’s military said on Sunday.
The Israeli military released more details from what it described as a field investigation into the fatal shooting of the three men, who had emerged shirtless from a building and were carrying a makeshift white flag. A post on the Israeli military’s official Telegram account said there were indications that the three men had been in a building adjacent to the scene of the shooting for some time.
The shooting, which prompted widespread anguish in Israel and was held up by critics of Israel’s war effort as evidence of the military’s disregard for civilian safety, remains under review. Military officials have said that the shooting violated Israel’s rules of engagement.
Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, told a group of soldiers in Gaza on Sunday that the hostages had tried to minimize the risk of approaching the soldiers by taking off their shirts to show that they were not carrying any explosive devices.
The hostages, he said, “came speaking Hebrew, calling for help,” according to a transcript released on the military Telegram account.
The three hostages were Yotam Haim and Alon Shamriz, both taken from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, and Samer Talalka, who had been kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Am; both kibbutzim are in southern Israel near the Gaza border. They may have escaped from their captors in Gaza or been abandoned by them, according to an Israeli military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity under military protocol.
General Halevi said he was certain that the soldiers who opened fire on the escaped hostages “were confident they were doing the right thing.” He urged the soldiers he was addressing on Sunday to “use your head.”
Critics have seized on the shooting as an example of the Israeli military’s disregard for civilians in the territory. Since Israel responded to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack by mounting a military campaign in Gaza, nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, about 70 percent of whom were women and children, according to health authorities in Gaza.
General Halevi said it was the policy of Israel’s military to arrest people who lay down their arms and raise their hands. He said more than 1,000 such individuals had been taken into custody, and that valuable intelligence had been obtained as a result.
“We don’t shoot them, because the I.D.F. doesn’t shoot a person who raises their hands,” he said, using the acronym for the Israeli military. “That’s strength, not weakness.”
People ran to climb onto moving trucks carrying supplies, including water, and then threw boxes to a gathering crowd as the vehicles passed through Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Crowds of Gazans rushed flatbed trucks carrying aid in southern Gaza on Sunday, in a sign of the desperation among residents after more than two months of airstrikes and ground operations by Israeli forces.
In a video distributed by The Associated Press, a truck could be seen slowing down as it neared a group of people gathered in a road in Rafah. People jumped onto the truck and scaled the pallets of supplies even before the truck came to a halt. Another video showed a half-dozen men throwing boxes to a gathered crowd from the back of a moving flatbed, as another man clambered on top of the stacked pallets.
Roughly 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.2 million people have fled their homes amid airstrikes and evacuation orders from Israeli forces. Humanitarian groups have pleaded for weeks for additional aid, as food and fuel has dwindled and hospitals have shut down.
On Sunday, the United Nations said Israel had agreed to allow a second border crossing to open — on the Israel-Gaza border at Kerem Shalom — for aid deliveries. The only other open crossing had been at the city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt.
Both are near the southern end of the Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces have advised many evacuees to go. The situation in northern Gaza is dire.
Sami al-Najjar, a teacher in the Jabaliya section of northern Gaza, said in a phone interview on Friday that he was sometimes taking multivitamin pills instead of eating a meal.
During the weeklong cease-fire that ended Dec. 1, Mr. al-Najjar said, he was able to obtain some of the limited aid distributed in Jabaliya, after some aid recipients sold it because they needed cash. So far, he said, it was keeping him and the 22 others still sheltering with him alive.
He said that his family had fled to a shelter in a U.N.-run school to seek safety after his brother was killed in the fighting on Dec. 12, but found horrific conditions. Heavy rain and overflowing sewage had flooded the site, he said, and trash was everywhere.
“People literally wade into the sewage to get stuff from one place to another,” he said of the conditions at the shelter. “The people living in tents in the yard of the school were so helpless that they were sitting in their tents, and the rain and sewage was going right beneath them.”
Mr. al-Najjar said his family left after four days. They were unable to return to their damaged apartment, he said, but a neighbor who had evacuated to the south said they could break into his apartment and stay there instead.
Palestinians sheltering in a tent on Wednesday, at a camp for displaced people in Rafah.
People standing at a protest encampment near the Knesset last month.
An Israeli man was indicted on a charge of arson on Sunday, according to Israel’s Justice Ministry, 10 days after he set an anti-government protester’s tent ablaze, underscoring the rising tensions in an increasingly polarized Israeli society.
According to Tal Fintsy, late on the evening of Dec. 7 she lay in her sleeping bag at a protest encampment set up near the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, by bereaved families who had pressured Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take responsibility for the intelligence and military failures that led to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
Ms. Fintsy said in an interview with The New York Times that she noticed smoke from inside her tent. “Guys, there’s a fire,” she shouted as she ran outside, where a group of fellow protesters quickly doused the flames with fire extinguishers.
Following a police investigation, Noah Yohanan, 59, was arrested on suspicion of intentionally setting the tent on fire with a lighter. According to the Israeli police, Mr. Yohanan said he had done so because he was upset by images he saw on social media of anti-government posters created by the protesters.
The Oct. 7 attack, during which about 1,200 people were killed and 240 others were taken hostage, temporarily put a damper on tensions between pro-Netanyahu supporters and anti-government protesters, as well as on the weekly anti-government protests that had rocked the country since January. But Israelis on both sides of the conflict have become more outspoken in recent weeks.
A small contingent of anti-government protesters set up a protest camp in Jerusalem on Nov. 7. The first sizable anti-government demonstration, however, was held on Saturday, with hundreds of demonstrators, who were saddened and outraged by the recent accidental killing of three hostages, gathering in a central boulevard in Tel Aviv and marching through the city.
Ms. Fintsy, who participated in anti-government protests both before and after the war, said that she had been accustomed to being cursed at by right-wing Israelis who supported Mr. Netanyahu, but that Mr. Yohanan’s alleged actions had taken her by surprise.
“I didn’t expect that we would face such a level of hatred from a fellow citizen,” she said. “It’s become a civil war.”
The incident comes as Israel’s allies have been pressuring the country’s government to take right-wing violence more seriously. Earlier this month, the Biden administration expressed its dismay that Israel had not taken stronger steps to prevent right-wing violence by restricting Israeli settlers who were known to have engaged in violence against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank from traveling to the United States by issuing visa bans.
Palestinians gathering to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost region.Credit...Shadi Tabatibi/Reuters
Humanitarian aid began to dribble into the besieged Gaza Strip through a second border crossing Sunday morning, the United Nations said, as growing numbers of Gazans faced ceaseless hunger and cold, and aid groups warned of widespread disease.
Israel’s agency overseeing policy for the Palestinian territories, known as COGAT, posted on social media that 79 humanitarian aid trucks had been inspected on Sunday and allowed through the crossing at Kerem Shalom, which the United States had pressured Israel to open.
Humanitarian officials have warned for weeks that the amount of aid entering Gaza through the only other open crossing — at the city of Rafah, on Gaza’s border with Egypt — was far too little to address the needs of Gaza’s roughly 2.2 million people. COGAT reported that 122 trucks entered Gaza through the Rafah crossing on Sunday.
Tamara Alrifai, a spokeswoman for the U.N. agency that provides services to Palestinians in Gaza, said in an interview that Israel had agreed to allow in up to 200 trucks a day through Kerem Shalom, in addition to the aid already entering at Rafah.
That is still far fewer than the Kerem Shalom crossing typically saw before Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel, when about 500 truckloads of aid and commercial goods would enter Gaza through the crossing each day.
Conditions on the ground have spiraled into a crisis since Oct. 7, as Israel has pounded the territory with airstrikes and mounted a ground campaign that has sent nearly 85 percent of the population fleeing from their homes, according to the United Nations.
Only eight of the strip’s 36 hospitals are functional, according to the United Nations. A World Health Organization team that visited the region’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, to deliver supplies and medicine on Saturday described the emergency department as a “bloodbath” crowded with hundreds of patients, and more arriving every minute, the agency said on Sunday.
Over the last two weeks, the World Food Program found that half of all the households it spoke to for an assessment — people who had left their homes and were sheltering in southern Gaza — said they were consistently going to sleep hungry. Two-thirds of those households had so little to eat that they might have vegetables an average of about 1.5 days a week, lentils about twice a week and almost no dairy or meat. Two weeks earlier, 39 percent of households were in that category.
Israel is under international pressure to relieve the suffering of civilians in Gaza, where health officials say nearly 20,000 people have been killed since Israel began its response to the Oct. 7 attack. The Biden administration has begun pushing Israel to end its large-scale ground and air campaign in the Gaza Strip and switch to using smaller teams of highly trained troops to find and kill Hamas leaders.
Exiting the tunnel, which the Israeli military says is the largest it has yet discovered beneath Gaza.
The tunnel in the northern Gaza Strip is wide enough for a large car to pass through, reinforced with concrete and fitted with electrical wiring. And at least one section of the tunnel — which Israel says is the largest it has discovered in Gaza so far — is within walking distance of an Israeli border crossing.
Israel’s military took a group of reporters, including two journalists from The New York Times, into the tunnel on Friday. Its size and complexity, three Israeli defense officials say, show the scale of the challenge they face as they try to meet their goal of wiping out Hamas, which they say has built a network of tunnels throughout Gaza to allow it to evade and attack Israeli forces.
Israel arranged the tour while under increasing pressure from the United States to wind down the most intense phase of the war within weeks to try to limit a death toll from Gaza that has already reached nearly 20,000. The Biden administration envisions Israel transitioning from its large-scale ground and air campaign to one that would involve smaller groups of elite forces that would conduct more precise, intelligence-driven missions to find and kill Hamas leaders, rescue hostages and destroy tunnels, U.S. officials say.
The tunnel comes within walking distance of the border with Israel, according to the Israeli military.The size of this tunnel, and its location — coming within about 400 meters, or a quarter of a mile, of the border, the Israeli military said — also underscored Israel’s failure to identify and prevent such a structure from being built. But the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, who was among the officials who conducted the tour, said that the tunnel was proof that Hamas had diverted building materials, especially concrete, meant to be used to ease the lives of Gazans.
“This tunnel had been built for years,” he said. “Millions of dollars have been spent on this tunnel, hundreds of tons of cement, a lot of electricity — instead of spending all of them — the money, the cement, the electricity — on hospitals, schools, housing and other needs of the Gazans.”
The Times agreed to wait until Sunday to publish details of the tour, but there were otherwise no restrictions placed on how the visit would be reported. The journalists were accompanied the whole time and were not allowed to wander farther into the tunnel, with the Israeli forces stopping journalists at about 150 to 200 meters.
But even in that short section, it was possible to see that the tunnel continued a great distance ahead and that underfoot, vertical shafts extended down from the main tube, which Israeli officers said suggested the tunnel connected to a larger network.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arriving for a cabinet meeting in Tel Aviv on Sunday.
In the face of increasing pressure from the United States, Britain and Germany, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has doubled down on his opposition to what these allies see as the future of Gaza: an interim government overseen by the Palestinian Authority and an eventual Palestinian state existing alongside Israel.
Speaking only hours after the army admitted to shooting three Israeli hostages as they held up a white flag in Gaza, fueling consternation and anger among Israelis, Mr. Netanyahu appeared to be trying to change the subject, boasting that he had prevented the creation of a Palestinian state in the past and would continue to do so.
Mr. Netanyahu is hoping to hold on to power after the war, despite popular fury that Hamas built itself into a military power and invaded Israel on his watch. To do that, he is trying to appeal to Israelis, including his Likud party and its far-right coalition partners, who mistrust the Palestinians now more than ever and argue that a two-state solution is a dangerous fantasy.
But as the war continues without resolution, the deaths mount, many of the hostages remain in custody in Gaza and Israel’s main Western allies are sharpening their criticism of him — and even looking beyond him — Mr. Netanyahu’s grip on power seems shakier than ever.
A pro-Palestinian demonstration in London. In a joint opinion article, the foreign secretaries of Britain and Germany expressed support for a “sustainable cease-fire.
As Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III travels to the Middle East on Sunday to press Israel to scale back its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, two of Israel’s most important allies are urging the same — while advocating for a “sustainable” cease-fire.
In a joint opinion article published in The Sunday Times of London, the foreign secretaries of Britain and Germany displayed an important change in tone from their previous, all-out support for Israel. That echoes an apparent tonal shift from Washington, which has said Israel must do more to minimize harm to civilians in Gaza.
David Cameron of Britain and Annalena Baerbock of Germany argued, as has President Biden, that calls for an immediate cease-fire would only benefit Hamas. And they echoed the Biden administration in saying that “too many civilians have been killed” in Gaza by the Israeli military.
But they expressed support for a cease-fire that would go beyond a temporary pause in the fighting. Calls for an immediate cease-fire, they wrote, are “an understandable reaction to such intense suffering, and we share the view that this conflict cannot drag on and on. That is why we supported the recent humanitarian pauses.”
“Our goal cannot simply be an end to fighting today. It must be peace lasting for days, years, generations,” they added. “We therefore support a cease-fire, but only if it is sustainable.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far rejected calls for an immediate cease-fire and has opposed American calls for Gaza to be governed by a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority as a stage toward a two-state solution. In a news conference on Saturday night, Mr. Netanyahu boasted that he was “proud” to have prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state and described the Oslo Accords as “a fateful mistake.”
Mr. Cameron and Ms. Baerbock wrote that Israel has the right to defend itself, but it “must abide by international humanitarian law” and do more to protect civilians in Gaza. And its friends must push for a long-term solution embodying two states for two peoples, they said.
“Israel will not win this war if its operations destroy the prospect of peaceful coexistence with Palestinians,” they wrote, while noting that “leaving Hamas in power in Gaza would be a permanent roadblock on the path to a two-state solution.”
Their call for a sustainable cease-fire came as the foreign minister of France, Catherine Colonna, arrived in Israel for talks. Ms. Colonna reiterated on Sunday that France was calling for a truce to facilitate the release of any remaining hostages and to get more humanitarian aid into Gaza.
“What we think and what we say is that an immediate truce is needed, to move towards a cease-fire,” Ms. Colonna said, a day after her ministry confirmed that an Israeli bombing had killed one of its employees in southern Gaza.
American officials have made it clear that they are asking the Israelis to move in the next few weeks to a less violent phase of the war, using smaller squads of elite forces that would move in and out of population centers in Gaza, conducting more precise, intelligence-driven missions to find and kill Hamas leaders, rescue hostages and destroy tunnels.
Palestinians heading to work through a checkpoint in Meitar, Israel, in January.
Israeli government officials have been torn over whether to allow Palestinian workers from the West Bank to return to work in Israel, with some saying the move would threaten national security and others countering that it would bolster it.
More than 100,000 Palestinians in the West Bank had permits to work in Israel and Israeli settlements before the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terrorist attack — contributing heavily to the economy of the occupied territory. But a ban on the permits was instituted in wake of the assault, leading to a shortage of workers in many sectors.
Amid the labor crisis, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed support for resuming the West Bank work permits. But last weekend, he delayed a security cabinet vote on the issue after the socioeconomic cabinet voted 13-0, with two abstentions, against it. There was no sign that the issue would be taken up again soon.
Mr. Netanyahu has been under pressure from some in the security cabinet to bring back workers “because it is the right thing to do” and could “contain the pressure in the West Bank,” said Merav Michaeli, the outgoing Labor Party chief. She is also a member of the Knesset who opposes Mr. Netanyahu but is in rare agreement with him on this matter.
Still, it was not clear if Mr. Netanyahu would convince his far-right government allies who were staunchly opposed to West Bank worker permits, Ms. Michaeli added.
On Monday, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told reporters that a “strong economy and well-being among Palestinians” in the West Bank was vital to Israel’s security. He suggested that renewing work permits would help “build trust” between Palestinians and Israelis.
Mr. Gallant said he believed that letting Palestinians work inside Israel again could limit the extent to which they identify with Palestinians in Gaza.
On Thursday, Israeli settlers in the West Bank sent Mr. Netanyahu a letter insisting they be included in any decisions about the work permit issue.
Even if the Israeli government could agree on proceeding, some Palestinians may be reluctant to return to work in Israel. Jewish settlers in the West Bank have increasingly been arming themselves, and settler violence against Arabs has jumped. Across the entire West Bank, more than 280 Palestinians have been killed since Oct. 7 in clashes with Israeli troops and settlers, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah. And some Palestinians worry that working inside Israel could become riskier than it was before.
A poll from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted between late November and early December and released on Wednesday, based on 750 face-to-face interviews with people in the West Bank, found that support for Hamas had risen significantly in the West Bank compared to three months ago.
Some in the Israeli government, like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, contend that letting any Palestinians enter Israel now is a security risk. He and others want to recruit workers from elsewhere, including India.
The absence of laborers in Israel has been deeply felt at a time when many Israelis have been called up for reserve military duty.
Israel’s agriculture ministry was recruiting Israeli workers in an effort to fill the shortfall resulting from the ban and was offering to connect farmers and laborers through a new program instituted in November. The government was also seeking workers from abroad, including Vietnam. Israel had been negotiating with the Indian government to potentially issue permits to tens of thousands of Indians for work in construction and nursing, and the two nations have discussed increasing those numbers after the war in Gaza began.
Kenya’s labor ministry was planning to send about 1,500 farm workers to Israel, following an announcement from Malawi that it sent hundreds of laborers and was planning to send thousands more.
Israel relies heavily on foreign workers to supplement its labor force. About 30,000 Thai workers typically work in Israel. At least 39 Thai farmworkers were killed on Oct. 7 and about three dozen Thais were taken hostage, making them the biggest group of victims of the Oct. 7 attacks after Israelis. Two Tanzanian citizens who were part of an agricultural internship program sponsored by the Israeli government were also killed in the Oct. 7 attack.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, center, at a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem this week.
The fatal shooting by Israeli soldiers in Gaza of three unarmed men who turned out to be Israeli hostages could give momentum to those pushing for a new cease-fire to allow for more hostages to be released.
Critics of how Israel is prosecuting its war in Gaza also seized on the event, in which Israeli soldiers fatally shot three shirtless men who were waving a white flag, as an example of its military’s failure to live up to its promises to protect civilians.
The incident has caused anguish in Israel and added new urgency to arguments over how the country should pursue its goals in Gaza.
The Israeli government has vowed not to stop its operations in Gaza until the military has destroyed Hamas, which led a surprise assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7 that killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis and took about 240 others to Gaza as captives, according to Israeli officials.
A week of cease-fires between Israel and Hamas last month saw 105 hostages freed in exchange for the release of Palestinians from Israeli jails before negotiations broke down and the war resumed on Dec. 1.
About 120 Israeli soldiers and civilians remain captive in Gaza, and their relatives have been holding protests and lobbying the government to push for another cease-fire so that their loved ones can return home.
Ruby Chen, an Israeli American citizen whose son, Itay, is believed to be held hostage in Gaza, said that he supported freeing Palestinian prisoners charged with murdering Israelis if it meant the release of his son.
The families of hostages were trapped in a game of “Russian roulette,” Mr. Chen said in a statement given by a hostage family advocacy group on Saturday. “We have no time to lose — should we wait for another 10 hostages in coffins?”
Palestinians and critics of how Israel has been fighting in Gaza have called the killings, which likely only became public because the three men were Israeli, a small example of the Israeli military’s disregard for civilians in Gaza.
“Under the laws of war, people are presumed to be civilians,” said Sari Bashi, the program director at Human Rights Watch. “There needs to be strong information to suggest they are not before you can kill them.”
Those rules do not appear to have been followed in this case, she said, given that the men were shirtless and waving a white flag.
“Nobody batted an eye before killing them,” she said, noting that the investigation came only after the soldiers thought the men could be Israelis.
“The Israeli military is right to investigate the apparently unlawful attacks on these three men,” Ms. Bashi said. “But it should investigate when Palestinian civilians are the victims too.”
Since Israel responded to the Hamas-led attack with a vast military campaign in Gaza, nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, about 70 percent of whom were women and children, health authorities in Gaza say.
The Israeli military said that it went to great lengths to avoid harming Gaza’s civilians and accused Hamas of endangering them by embedding its fighters within the population. It also said the shooting of the three men on Friday violated the army’s rules of engagement.
Akram Attaallah, a columnist for Al-Ayyam, a Palestinian newspaper in the West Bank, said that he was not surprised Israeli forces had shot the three men and that Israel would not have had to disclose what happened to them had they been unarmed Palestinians.
“Israel kills even those who surrender and raise the white flag,” said Mr. Attaallah, who is from Gaza. “The narrative is a condemnation of the Israeli army.”
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