An Israeli airstrike in Gaza killed three sons of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, according to Israel’s army and the militant group’s official media, with Haniyeh accusing Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.”
The Israeli military confirmed it carried out the attack Wednesday, saying the men conducted militant activity in central Gaza, without elaborating. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed.
In an interview with the Al Jazeera satellite channel, Haniyeh said the killings would not pressure Hamas into softening its positions amid ongoing cease-fire negotiations with Israel, brokered by international mediators.
Haniyeh left Gaza in 2019 and lives in exile in Qatar. The top Hamas leader in Gaza is Yehya Sinwar, who masterminded the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that sparked the war. Some 1,200 people were killed in the attack, mostly civilians, and Palestinian militants took around 250 people hostage.
Israel’s six-month war against Hamas has devastated the Gaza Strip and pushed the tiny Palestinian territory into a humanitarian crisis, leaving more than 1 million people on the brink of starvation.
Israeli bombardments and ground offensives have killed at least 33,360 Palestinians and wounded 74,993, Gaza’s Health Ministry says. The ministry doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants in its tally, but says women and children make up two-thirds of the dead.
PHOTOS: The Latest | Israeli strike kills 3 sons of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh
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- Austin tells Congress Israel is taking steps to boost aid to Gaza as lawmakers question US support
- Turkey and Israel announce trade barriers on each other as relations deteriorate over Gaza
- At U.N. court, Germany rejects allegations that it’s facilitating acts of genocide in Gaza
- A Moroccan activist was sentenced to 5 years for criticizing the country’s ties to Israel
- Find more AP coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war
Here’s the latest:
JERUSALEM - A off-duty Palestinian staff member with the food aid charity World Central Kitchen was badly wounded by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on April 1, the same day seven other staffers were killed in a separate Israeli attack.
The staffer, identified only as Amro, was pulled from the rubble of a residence after an Israeli strike hit a nearby mosque, in the vicinity of a WCK warehouse and kitchen, the charity said Wednesday. He spent time in a coma, and WCK said is still recovering in a hospital from head and hand injuries.
Amro had joined WCK at the start of the year, the charity said in a statement, and before the war had owned a sweet shop that was destroyed by Israeli bombardments.
The statement said Amro turned down chances to leave Gaza several times: “He always says, ‘I am here serving people hot food every day. I will not leave my job and let them suffer.’”
On April 1, Israeli airstrikes on an aid convoy killed seven WCK workers - six foreigners and one Palestinian. Israel says the deaths were a tragic error. WCK laid the blame squarely on Israel’s military, saying the army had coordinated over the movement of the cars carrying the workers as they left northern Gaza.
Nearly every day, strikes level buildings with Palestinian families inside, killing men, women and children, with no explanation of the target or independent accountability over the proportionality of the strike. Israel blames the large number of civilian casualties on militants, saying they operate among the population.
TEL AVIV, Israel - Israel will soon open a new crossing to deliver humanitarian aid into the hard-hit northern Gaza Strip, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Wednesday.
Gallant’s announcement comes at a time of heavy U.S. pressure to increase the flow of desperately needed aid into Gaza. Earlier Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden said Israel’s efforts are still “not enough.”
Israeli officials say the new crossing will be built instead of using the damaged Erez crossing, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged last week to open. Erez was destroyed by Hamas militants during their Oct. 7 attack and was designed for pedestrians, not cargo, according to COGAT, the Israeli military body in charge of Palestinian civilian affairs.
An official from COGAT said the new crossing would be close to the beachfront on Gaza’s northern tip. It was not clear exactly when the crossing will be opened. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
At a briefing with reporters, Gallant said Israel plans a number of additional steps to improve the humanitarian situation – including using its port in the southern Israeli city of Ashdod to accept aid shipments for the Palestinians. It was not clear when the port would open.
He also says Israel will allow Jordan to deliver more aid to Gaza, and that Israel is working with the U.S. on infrastructure projects such as new water lines.
Israel faces pressure from the U.S. to increase aid into Gaza, where its offensive has wreaked an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. Aid groups say supplies are not reaching people quickly enough, blaming Israeli restrictions and noting that thousands of trucks are waiting to enter Gaza.
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Associated Press writer Julia Frankel contributed.
WASHINGTON - U.S. President Joe Biden said Wednesday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not doing enough to increase humanitarian aid into Gaza.
“We’ll see what he does in terms of meeting the commitments that he made to me,” Biden said at the White House.
Biden has warned Netanyahu that future U.S. support for the war depends on swift implementation of new steps to protect civilians and aid workers. Although the flow of trucks has increased since Biden spoke with Netanyahu last week, the U.S. president said Israel should open another access point in Gaza’s north.
Israel halted aid deliveries to Gaza in the early days of the war, but under U.S. pressure has slowly increased the number of trucks allowed to enter the territory.
Still, aid groups say supplies are not reaching desperate people quickly enough, blaming Israeli restrictions and noting that thousands of trucks are waiting to enter Gaza. Countries have attempted less efficient ways to deliver aid, including airdrops and by sea.
JERUSALEM - Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei again promised to retaliate against Israel over the killings of Iranian generals in a strike on its consulate in Syria.
Khamenei spoke Wednesday at a prayer ceremony in Tehran celebrating the first day of the Eid al-Fitr holiday and the end of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan. He said last week’s attack on Iran’s consulate in Damascus, widely blamed on Israel, was akin to an attack on Iranian territory. “The evil regime must be punished, and it will be punished,” he added.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz appeared to respond, posting on social platform X in both Farsi and Hebrew: “If Iran attacks from its territory, Israel will respond and attack in Iran.”
The strike on April 1 killed 12 people, including seven Iranian Revolutionary Guard members, four Syrians and a Hezbollah militia member. Israel has not acknowledged its involvement, though it has been bracing for an Iranian response to the attack, which marked a significant escalation in their long-running shadow war.
Iran supports anti-Israeli militant groups like Hamas, who are battling Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, as well as the Lebanese Hezbollah.
TEL AVIV, Israel - U.S. President Joe Biden says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to the war against Hamas is mistaken.
Biden’s remarks in an interview that aired late Tuesday deepen an already growing rift between the two staunch allies over the war, now in its seventh month. Those disagreements have compounded over the worsening humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s expected offensive in the city of Rafah and Israel’s recent strike on a humanitarian convoy, which killed seven aid workers, most of them foreigners.
“What he’s doing is a mistake. I don’t agree with his approach,” Biden told U.S. Spanish-language broadcaster Univision in an interview conducted on April 3, two days after the strike on the World Central Kitchen aid convoy. He was responding to a question about whether Netanyahu was letting political considerations steer his decision-making in the war.
Biden said Israel should agree to a cease-fire, flood beleaguered Gaza with aid for the next six to eight weeks and allow regional countries to help distribute the aid. “It should be done now,” he said.
The Biden administration was outspoken in its support for Israel following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, but in recent weeks has stepped up criticism of Israel’s approach to the war.
Israel and Hamas are holding talks meant to bring about a cease-fire in exchange for the release of hostages, although the sides still disagree on key terms of a deal.
MELBOURNE, Australia - Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong is facing criticism after she raised the prospect of Australia recognizing a Palestinian state.
Wong said in a speech late Tuesday that recognizing Palestinian statehood could be the only way to end the cycle of violence in the Middle East and build momentum toward a two-state solution amid ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israel. She said Wednesday she wasn’t changing Australia’s position, but was starting a conversation.
“We’ve made no such decision. The discussion I want to have is to look at what is happening in the international community where there is the very important debate about how it is we secure long-lasting peace in a region which has known so much conflict,” Wong told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Wong said Hamas must free hostages and that the militant group would have no place in a Palestinian state. She also said there needed to be an immediate humanitarian cease-fire so that aid could be delivered to Gaza. And she urged Israel not to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah because of the risk to civilians.
Both Australia’s center-left Labor Party government and the conservative opposition parties support a two-party solution in the Middle East.
But opposition spokesperson on foreign affairs Simon Birmingham called it “downright dangerous to reward (Hamas for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel) with a fast track to recognition of statehood.”
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip - An Israeli airstrike hit a home in central Gaza on Tuesday evening, killing at least 11 people, including seven women and children, hospital officials said.
After the strike hit in the town of Zawaida, Associated Press footage showed one man carrying the limp body of a little girl and laying her with the bodies of other dead children on the floor at the main hospital in nearby Deir al-Balah. Hospital officials said the dead included five children and two women.
The strike came as the Israeli military withdrew its forces from the southern city of Khan Younis this week, ending a monthslong ground assault that left large parts of the city in ruins. Still, airstrikes have continued in the past days, including in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, where Israel says it plans to launch its next ground assault.
WASHINGTON - Several family members of hostages held by Hamas met with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House on Tuesday and urged for a deal that would release their loved ones and implement a temporary cease-fire in Gaza.
“The only hope for peace is through the release of all the hostages now,” said Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the father of American hostage Sagui Dekel-Chen. On a potential hostage agreement, Dekel-Chen stressed that the world is waiting for “Hamas to get to yes.”
Rachel Goldberg, the mother of American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, called the meeting with Harris “very productive.” She expressed gratitude to the White House and lawmakers for their support, but added: “We need results. We need our people home.”
“You can believe as we do that it is horrible that innocent civilians in Gaza are suffering,” Goldberg said. “And at the same time, you can also know that it is horrible and against international law for hostages to be held against their will.”
During the meeting, Harris emphasized that she and President Joe Biden “have no higher priority than reuniting the hostages with their loved ones,” according to a White House readout, as she gave an update on the administration’s efforts on a hostage deal.
WASHINGTON - U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress Tuesday that pressure on Israel to improve humanitarian aid to Gaza appears to be working, but he said more must be done and it remains to be seen if the improvement will continue.
“It clearly had an effect. We have seen changes in behavior, and we have seen more humanitarian assistance being pushed into Gaza,” Austin said in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. “Hopefully that trend will continue.”
Austin’s comments came during a session that was interrupted several times by protesters shouting at him to stop sending weapons to Israel. “Stop the genocide,” they said, as they lifted their hands, stained in red, in the air. A number of senators also decried the civilian casualties, saying the administration needs to do more to press Israel to protect the population in Gaza.
In response, Austin said he spoke with his Israeli counterpart, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, on Monday and that he repeated U.S. insistence that Israel must move civilians out of the battlespace in Gaza and properly care for them.
Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. CQ Brown Jr. were testifying on Capitol Hill about the Pentagon’s $850 billion budget for 2025.
WASHIGNTON - U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday said Israel has not apprised the U.S. of any specific date for the start of a major offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, but added that American and Israeli officials remained in contact to try to ensure that “any kind of major military operation doesn’t do real harm to civilians.”
Blinken spoke a day after Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu vowed that a date has been set to invade Rafah. The city is filled with around 1.4 million Palestinians, most of whom are displaced from other parts of the Gaza Strip. The United States, Israel’s closest ally, has said a ground operation into Rafah would be a mistake and has demanded to see a credible plan to protect civilians.
Washington has also been applying pressure on Israel to improve humanitarian aid to Gaza, where half the population is starving and on the brink of famine due to Israel’s tight restrictions on allowing aid trucks through.
“We’re looking at a number of critical things that need to happen in the coming days,” Blinken said, referring to recent Israeli announcements on the opening of new aid routes into Gaza and more active efforts to avoid casualties to both civilians and humanitarian relief workers. “But what matters is results and sustained results and this is what we will be looking at very carefully in the days ahead.”
That includes getting assistance in and distributed to all of the territory “not just in the south, or in central Gaza. It has to get to the north as well,” he said.
PARIS - France’s foreign minister says his country is using “all levels of influence,” including threats of sanctions, to force Israel to open crossings with Gaza for vital humanitarian aid to reach Palestinians.
France was the first country to propose European Union sanctions against violent Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné said in an interview Tuesday with French broadcasters RFI and FRANCE 24.
He added: “We have multiple ways to utilize our influence, obviously, we can provide more sanctions … to let humanitarian aid convoys cross checkpoints” and reach people in Gaza.
Sejourne did not elaborate on what kind of sanctions he was referring to. It is highly unlikely that France would impose any eventual sanctions without broader EU support, and the EU has been divided over policy toward Israel.
JERUSALEM - Israel shot down a drone over the Red Sea overnight in what the military described as the first deployment of its naval Iron Dome missile defense system.
The military said that a Corvette warship shot down the drone as it flew east over waters near the southern Israeli city of Eilat. The military released grainy aerial footage of the missile making contact with an aircraft.
It was not immediately clear who was directing the drone. Yemen’s Houthi rebels have been conducting near daily attacks on commercial and military ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, launching drones and missiles from rebel-held areas of Yemen.
The Israeli defense system, called the “C-Dome,” is a naval version of the Iron Dome, which has been used to shoot down rockets fired from the Gaza Strip for the past decade.
JERUSALEM - Foreign Minister Israel Katz says Israel is preparing a ban on products from Turkey after Ankara announced it was restricting exports to Israel.
Turkey said earlier Tuesday it is restricting exports of dozens of products to Israel, including aluminum, steel, construction products and chemical fertilizers. It said it would continue the measures until Israel declares a cease-fire and allows the uninterrupted flow of aid to Gaza.
Katz said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is sacrificing the economic interests of his citizens “for his support of Hamas.”
Relations between Turkey and Israel have been frosty for years, although trade ties between the two countries are strong.
NATO-member Turkey is among the strongest critics of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
Erdogan has repeatedly called for an immediate cease-fire and accused Israel of committing genocide in its military campaign in Gaza. The Israeli Foreign Ministry had no additional comment.
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