Peter Baker, Adam Rasgon, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Eric Schmitt and Alissa J. Rubin, Victoria Kim, Vivian Yee, Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Adam Rasgon
President Biden’s Middle East coordinator, Brett McGurk, will meet with Egyptian and Qatari leaders in hopes of making progress toward freeing captives held by Hamas.
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Family members of hostages and their supporters protested in Tel Aviv on Saturday.
A senior Biden administration official is heading back to the Middle East on Sunday in hopes of making progress toward an agreement that would result in the release of more hostages held by Hamas in exchange for a pause in Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip, two American officials said.
President Biden’s Middle East coordinator at the White House, Brett McGurk, will travel to Cairo to meet with Gen. Abbas Kamel, the chief of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service and widely considered the nation’s second most powerful official, according to the American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of diplomatic talks. Mr. McGurk will later head to Doha, Qatar, to meet with the country’s prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani.
Egyptian and Qatari leaders have been important players in hostage talks and helped broker a cease-fire in November during which Hamas released more than 100 people from captivity.
The trip by Mr. McGurk comes as Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said once again that he would not meet Hamas’s demands of a withdrawal of Israeli forces in return for the release of hostages. “Let it be clear: I utterly reject the Hamas monsters’ capitulation terms,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement on Sunday.
Israeli officials say about 240 people were taken hostage during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel led by Hamas, which also killed about 1,200 people. But divisions have emerged in Israel over the path forward, with some citizens protesting the government’s failure to secure the hostages’ release, including a group that gathered near Mr. Netanyahu’s Jerusalem home on Sunday, according to Israeli media. Doubts have also emerging among military leaders that fighting alone could achieve their safe return; Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief who is serving in the war cabinet, said in a television interview last week that it was an “illusion” to believe that the hostages could be safely secured through military operations.
Mr. McGurk’s trip, which was previously reported by Axios, comes just days after Israel and Hamas agreed through Qatari intermediaries to allow medicine to be delivered to hostages in exchange for additional medicine and aid for civilians in Gaza.
But American officials have said a new hostage release has been complicated by Hamas’s evident desire for a permanent cease-fire, rather than the kind of temporary pause that accompanied the releases in November.
Administration officials said the hostages were just one of several topics arising from the Israel-Hamas war that Mr. McGurk will address on his travels to the region. Mr. Netanyahu has also grown increasingly vocal in pushing back against Mr. Biden’s insistence that Israel ultimately negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state in exchange for guarantees of its own security.
Mr. Netanyahu publicly rejected the idea again this weekend, after speaking with Mr. Biden on Friday about the issue of a two-state solution, saying on Sunday that all territory west of the Jordan River must be under “full Israeli security control.”
President Biden met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his war cabinet in October.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel doubled down on his opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state this weekend, again rebuffing pressure from President Biden to agree to that path after the war in Gaza is over.
“My insistence is what has prevented — over the years — the establishment of a Palestinian state that would have constituted an existential danger to Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement in Hebrew on Sunday. “As long as I am prime minister, I will continue to strongly insist on this.”
The statement reiterated comments he made on social media the previous day, when he said in Hebrew that he “will not compromise on full Israeli security control of the entire area west of the Jordan River — and that is irreconcilable with a Palestinian state.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s comments came after Mr. Biden spoke to him on Friday about a two-state solution and floated the possibility of a disarmed Palestinian nation that would not threaten Israel’s security. Mr. Biden has argued that the creation of a Palestinian state is the only viable long-term resolution to a conflict that has dragged on for decades, repeating a position held by most American presidents and European leaders in recent history.
While there was no indication that Mr. Netanyahu would ease his strenuous opposition, which is popular with his fragile right-wing political coalition, Mr. Biden had expressed optimism that they might yet find consensus.
“There are a number of types of two-state solutions,” the president told reporters at the White House several hours after Friday’s call, their first in nearly a month amid tension over the war. “There’s a number of countries that are members of the U.N. that are still — don’t have their own militaries. Number of states that have limitations.” He added, “And so I think there’s ways in which this could work.”
On Sunday, Grant Shapps, Britain’s defense secretary, called Mr. Netanyahu’s stance “disappointing.”
“There isn’t another option,” Mr. Shapps told Sky News in a televised interview. “The whole world has agreed that the two-state solution is the best way forward.”
António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, said that denying statehood for the Palestinian people was “unacceptable.”
“The right of the Palestinian people to build their own state must be recognized by all,” Mr. Guterres wrote on X, without referencing Mr. Netanyahu.
The Biden administration and the Israeli government have diverged sharply over how Gaza will be governed when the fighting ends. President Biden and his top diplomat, Antony J. Blinken, have urged Israeli officials to move toward the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state.
Mr. Biden has suggested that a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, could take over Gaza once Hamas has been removed from power there. Mr. Netanyahu has rejected the idea of the authority returning to the enclave.
Despite support from the international community, a two-state approach still faces enormous obstacles, including waning support for it among the Israeli and Palestinian populations, the continued building of settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and a divided Palestinian leadership.
Two key partners in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition — Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister — are staunch opponents of a two-state solution. Some analysts have suggested the two ministers and their parties would vote to dissolve the government if Mr. Netanyahu took serious steps to advance the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Analysts pointed out that Mr. Netanyahu’s willingness to undermine his American counterpart was becoming routine.
“Humiliating Biden has become a daily occurrence for Netanyahu,” Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a think tank in Washington, wrote on social media.
António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, at a summit in Uganda on Sunday.
Israel’s military operation in Gaza has led to destruction and killing on a scale that is “utterly unacceptable,” the United Nations’ secretary general, António Guterres, said on Sunday as the Gazan Health Ministry said the death toll in the territory since the start of the offensive had surpassed 25,000.
Mr. Guterres called for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza that would allow aid to reach all those in need, and to facilitate the release of hostages taken during an attack on Israel led by Hamas on Oct. 7, during which the Israeli authorities say around 1,200 people were killed. More than 100 hostages remain in captivity.
In response to the Oct. 7 attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began a campaign of airstrikes in Gaza and a ground invasion in a bid to eradicate Hamas. The government also declared a siege of Gaza, which has a population of about 2.2 million people.
Israel’s government says that civilian casualties are a tragedy, but it argues that it bombards residential areas because Hamas hides its forces among the civilian population and has built an extensive network of tunnels, some of them beneath hospitals. It also says that it warns civilians to move to areas away from the fighting.
Almost all of Gaza’s population has been displaced because of Israel’s military campaign, and international groups say the aid that is making it into Gaza is a small fraction of what is necessary to stem the humanitarian crisis that has played out over the last three months.
“This is heartbreaking,” Mr. Guterres said about the loss of life. He was speaking in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, during a summit that aims to increase trade and investment between nations in parts of the world that are less economically developed.
“The Middle East is a tinderbox,” he said. “We must do all we can to prevent conflict igniting across the region.”
Mr. Guterres said the destruction and civilian death toll in Gaza — which includes more than 150 U.N. staff members killed — were more severe than any that had occurred since he assumed his current post in 2017. In comparison, the United Nations says the fighting in Ukraine, which has also caused immense military losses, has killed at least 10,000 civilians since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
In a further indication of the casualty toll, the British charity Save the Children said this month that Israel’s military operation had killed 10,000 children, and that thousands more were missing and presumed buried under the rubble.
The United Nations and aid groups cite the Gazan health ministry’s casualty toll in their reports, though those numbers have at times been the subject of debate. That is in part because officials in Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and fighters, and because the level of destruction has made it difficult for them to provide an accurate accounting. U.S. and Israeli government officials have sometimes cast doubt on the casualty numbers, though they have not in recent weeks systematically challenged the ministry’s figures.
Palestinian authorities also say that more than 62,000 people have been injured in the war. The head of the United Nations World Health Organization’s operation in Gaza and the West Bank said that many of them are children who have had limbs amputated and will need continued care.
U.S. aircraft on the tarmac at Al Asad Air Base after it was struck by rockets in January 2020.
At least two U.S. service members stationed in western Iraq were injured on Saturday when their air base came under heavy rocket and missile fire from what American officials said were Iran-backed militias, as the ripple effects of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip continued to roil the Middle East.
Ever since Hamas, also an ally of Iran, charged into Israel and carried out terror attacks on Oct. 7, Israel has retaliated with an overwhelming and ferocious offensive, and groups sympathetic to Hamas’s cause have attacked Israeli and American targets.
A U.S. official cautioned that initial information was sketchy and that the number of injured could grow as damage reports from officers in Iraq are passed up the chain of command. A number of American military personnel were being evaluated for traumatic brain injuries. One Iraqi soldier was injured as well, said Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool, the military spokesman for Iraq’s prime minister, Mohammed Shia al Sudani.
The attack against Al Asad Air Base in Iraq, which came at 6:30 p.m. local time, was the latest and the most serious of roughly 140 such rocket and missile strikes against U.S. troops based in Iraq and Syria since the Gaza war started. At least 10 rockets and seven short-range ballistic missiles were fired at the base, with two making it through air defense systems, in the most successful attack the militias had carried out so far. The attack was another example of the region being pulled into a broader conflict.
Israel and Hezbollah, another Iranian ally, have traded fire across the Lebanese border. A Houthi militia in Yemen, also backed by Iran, has fired missiles and drones at commercial ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, calling it a retaliation for the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. The United States and its allies have fired back, striking inside Yemen multiple times.
The hostilities have spread from there. In recent days, Iran fired missiles into Iraq, Syria and Pakistan, calling it a defensive strike against terrorist groups, but also claiming to have gone after an Israeli intelligence base. Pakistan said it had swiftly struck back with airstrikes inside Iran.
Then on Saturday, Iran accused Israel of launching an airstrike on the Syrian capital, Damascus, that killed five Iranian military figures. Soon after, the missile and rocket barrage hit American troops at the air base in Iraq.
The Al Asad Air Base, in Iraq’s western desert, is now primarily used by Iraqi forces but still has a U.S. contingent. In all, there are 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq and 900 in Syria, helping to support Iraq and Kurdish Syrian forces in the fight to tamp down the remains of the Islamic State. American officials in Washington said on Saturday it was not immediately clear if the militia attacks in Iraq were related to the earlier strikes in Syria.
There have been 140 militia attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria in the past three months, with 57 in Iraq and 83 in Syria, Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said on Thursday.
Nearly 70 U.S. personnel have suffered injuries in the attacks, including traumatic brain injuries, but all but a handful of the troops have been able to return to duty relatively quickly, Pentagon officials have said.
Iranian-linked militias in Iraq, known collectively as the Axis of Resistance and who count themselves as part of Iran’s network of allies across the Middle East, claimed in a statement that this latest attack was a response to Israel’s war in Gaza. There was no mention of the strike in Syria.
Palestinians lining up with their children to receive vaccinations in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip this month.
International agencies, aid workers and physicians are giving a harrowing picture of what they say is the disproportionate burden and risk of war borne by the women of Gaza.
With a barely functioning health care system, extreme shortages of food and clean water, and repeated displacement, pregnant women, mothers and newborns are particularly vulnerable, the groups say.
Out of every 10 people killed in Gaza since the Oct. 7 attack in Israel that prompted the war, seven have been women or children, a “cruel inversion” compared with the previous 15 years, when roughly the same proportion of civilians killed in the territory were men, according to U.N. Women, the United Nations’ women’s rights agency.
The agency said in a report released Friday that two mothers were being killed every hour. The agency extrapolated that figure by comparing demographic data on marriage and motherhood in Gaza with the total number of women reported to have been killed. The report also said that nearly a million women and girls had been displaced by the fighting.
On Sunday, Gazan health officials updated the overall death toll, saying that more than 25,000 Palestinians had been killed in the war.
Separately, an official with UNICEF who recently visited Gaza and met with mothers at a hospital in Rafah, the southern city that has become the refuge of last resort for civilians fleeing the fighting, said Friday that the situation for pregnant women and newborns was “beyond belief.”
Tess Ingram, a communications specialist with UNICEF, gave a briefing in Geneva and described speaking with a midwife who said she had performed emergency C-sections on six dead women in the past eight weeks and seen more miscarriages than she could count. A woman told her that her fetus had gone still inside her womb but wondered out loud whether it was for the best that “a baby isn’t born into this nightmare,” Ms. Ingram recounted.
“Becoming a mother should be a time for celebration,” she said. “In Gaza, it’s another child delivered into hell.”
The report and Ms. Ingram’s remarks echoed the warnings of a letter published in the most recent issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, in which five public health experts said “urgent protection” was needed for Gaza’s pregnant women. The World Health Organization has estimated that there are about 52,000 pregnant women in the enclave, with about 180 births each day.
“Women who are pregnant and exposed to armed conflict have higher rates of miscarriage, stillbirths, prematurity, congenital abnormalities and other adverse outcomes,” they said. “What we are currently witnessing will most probably create long-lasting generational effects.”
U.N. Women has faced a storm of criticism for being slow to address the sexual violence committed during the Hamas-led assault in Israel on Oct. 7. On Friday, the agency’s executive director, Sima Bahous, said in a statement that the organization condemns “all acts of sexual and gender-based violence wherever, whenever, and against whomever they are perpetrated” and called for accountability.
Food being distributed to people in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Saturday.
American, British and European officials are pressuring Israel to let aid for Gaza transit through the Israeli port of Ashdod to help alleviate a metastasizing humanitarian crisis, according to six U.S. and European officials.
Israel’s military responded to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by invading and declaring a siege on Gaza, which was already under a yearslong blockade. It has since allowed limited amounts of aid into the enclave through two border points, one in Israel and the other in Egypt, but those deliveries have been bogged down by inspections and logistical snarls.
Humanitarian workers say vastly more aid is needed to meaningfully help Gaza’s 2.2 million residents amid dire shortages of food, water and supplies.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken pressed Israeli officials about allowing Gaza aid through the port of Ashdod when he was in Tel Aviv earlier this month, according to one U.S. official. That official and the others interviewed about the new aid proposal spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.
Under the new proposed agreement, aid would be shipped from Cyprus — an Israeli ally — to Ashdod, three of the officials said. From Ashdod, it would then be transported to Kerem Shalom, the Israeli border crossing through which aid has been allowed into Gaza, a European official said.
The ultimate goal, an American and a European official said, is to establish a workable alternative to delivering aid via Egypt in a way that satisfies Israel’s demand for security checks. Israeli officials have demanded stringent inspections on all supplies entering Gaza so as to weed out anything that could benefit Hamas.
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid arrived from Egypt on the Israeli side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing before entering the southern Gaza Strip this month.
A small step came on Friday, when the White House said that Israel would permit flour for Gaza to be shipped through Ashdod amid efforts to find “options for more direct maritime delivery of assistance.”
“We need these shipments to continue and for this port to remain open for aid,” Britain’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, said on the social media platform X after the White House announcement about the flour shipments.
The Israeli government has not formally announced the decision to let flour shipments through Ashdod, and the prime minister’s office declined to comment. But the Israeli security cabinet quietly agreed to the plan on Friday, according to an Israeli official briefed on the deliberations.
Ashdod sits about 16 miles north of Gaza on Israel’s Mediterranean coast. Israel has been reluctant to open Ashdod for assistance destined for Gaza amid concerns that having more aid delivered through Israeli soil could prompt public backlash at a time when Israeli hostages are still being held in the enclave, according to a senior Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
(For most of the war, aid has been delivered to Egypt before being inspected by Israel close to its border with Egypt, barely touching Israeli territory before being sent to Gaza. In December, some trucks from Jordan started going through Kerem Shalom.)
Gaza urgently needs the help. The United Nations has warned that risk of famine is growing, clean water is scarce and diseases are spreading. Amid Israeli airstrikes and intense fighting, Gaza’s hospitals have struggled to deal with a seemingly constant stream of wounded people and grossly inadequate medical supplies.
Friends and relatives of Tawfic Abdel Jabbar gathered for a vigil at Masjid Omar, the mosque where Tawfic’s family worships, in Harvey, La., on Saturday.
He loved to play basketball with his friends. He dreamed of studying business administration to help his family’s stores. He enjoyed taking care of his younger siblings and was “very polite, very respectful, very intelligent,” according to his mosque’s president. Then, suddenly, a bullet to his head ended everything.
A Palestinian-American teenager was killed by gunfire in the occupied West Bank on Friday. The U.S. State Department confirmed the killing without naming the victim, but the teenager’s family identified him as Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, 17. The details of Tawfic’s death were unclear, but Tawfic’s family said he was hit after an off-duty Israeli soldier and Israeli settlers targeted the vehicle he was driving. The Israeli police has said that the killing involved an off-duty officer and an Israeli civilian, and that they were investigating the incident.
Tawfic was born to Palestinian parents and was raised in the suburbs of New Orleans. His grandfather had come to America “looking for the American dream,” said Sherean Murad, the assistant principal at the Muslim Academy in Gretna, who taught Tawfic civics when he was in the 11th grade.
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