Meanwhile, Israel bombed Aleppo and Neirab, leaving Syrians trapped between two forces raining fire from the sky.
Idlib, Syria — Two civilians, including a child, were killed, and 16 others, including four children, were injured in an artillery attack by Syrian regime forces targeting a popular market in the centre of Idlib city on Saturday evening, according to the Syria Civil Defence.
“We received two martyrs and 14 injuries, including two critical cases, at the hospital, and they are now in the operating room,” said Ismail al-Hassan, the head of the emergency department at Idlib University Hospital.
Al-Hassan told Al Jazeera that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad had recently intensified its targeting of the area, necessitating a constant state of preparedness to receive any injuries within the city or its vicinity in the event of any bombardment.
“For nearly 13 years, we have been working to save civilian casualties targeted by the Assad regime and Russia,” al-Hassan said. The Syria Civil Defence, also known as the White Helmets, said that earlier on Saturday, a child was wounded as a result of artillery shelling targeting the city of Atarib in the western Aleppo countryside.
“The timing and location of today’s attack in Idlib indicate that its goal is to kill the largest number of civilians,” said Ahmed Yazji, a board member of the Syria Civil Defence. Yazj told Al Jazeera that the attacks by the Syrian regime and Russia on the Idlib region consistently aim to target vital centres, schools, and hospitals with the intention of killing civilians.
“Since the beginning of 2023 until today, we have documented more than 1,200 attacks by the Assad regime and Russia on the northwestern Syria region, including 27 attacks on schools and 16 attacks on displaced camps,” he said. “The attacks of the Assad regime and Russia on the region can only be described as terrorist attacks seeking to undermine stability in the area.”
Idlib province, the last stronghold controlled by Syrian opposition fighters, is considered the most densely populated area in northwestern Syria, hosting 4.5 million people, including 1.9 million living in internally displaced camps, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
“Within moments, the market turned into a pool of blood and thick dust,” said Abdullah Aloush, a displaced person from Khan Shaykhun and the owner of a nearby shop in the targeted area in Idlib city. Aloush told Al Jazeera that the market was targeted at a time when it was crowded with civilians. “Initially, myself and those with me in the shop were helpless, not knowing what to do, before we went out to check on our neighbours and assist the injured.”
Earlier on Saturday, Israeli warplanes conducted air strikes on Aleppo and Neirab airports, as well as several points belonging to the Syrian regime south of Aleppo. The Israeli air strikes targeted farms between the villages of Zahabiya and Sheikh Saeed in the Neirab military airport area, housing warehouses and headquarters for Iranian militias. A missile also fell in the area of Aleppo International Airport and Neirab military airport, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, based in London.
“As usual, the Assad regime, unable to respond to Israeli raids on its sites, targets civilians in northwestern Syria,” said Mohammed al-Saleh, 34, the owner of a cafe on the street in Idlib that was bombed.
Al-Saleh, who was approximately 15m (50 feet) away from the bombing, warned everyone in the cafe not to leave the place for fear of a repeat of the bombing in the area and to avoid new casualties. “At these moments, our feeling can only be described as being in the embrace of death,” said Al-Saleh. “In these days, while people around the world are preparing to celebrate the start of a new year, we in Idlib are preparing to bury our friends and family who were killed today.”
Sao Paulo, Brazil – It wasn’t unusual for patients to arrive in a foul temper at the hospital emergency room in São Paulo, Brazil, where physician Batull Sleiman worked.
After all, every day brought new medical crises, new requests for urgent care. Sleiman had seen it all. But she was not expecting the level of anger she received several weeks ago.
A patient had arrived in her examination room frustrated over the time he spent waiting for a doctor’s care. Sleiman recalled his issue was “not urgent”. Still, as she treated him, he accused her of being impolite.
“You’re being rude with me because you’re not from Brazil,” Sleiman remembers him saying. “If you were in your country…”
Batull Sleiman believes one of her patients lashed out after seeing her hijab [Courtesy of Batull Sleiman]
Sleiman said she turned away rather than hear the rest. The daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she believes the man reacted the way he did because of one thing: her hijab.
“I was surprised and outraged,” Sleiman told Al Jazeera. But, she added, the atmosphere in Brazil had grown more tense since the war in Gaza had erupted. “I’ve been noticing that people have been staring more at me on the street since October.”
But Sleiman is not alone in feeling singled out. As the war in Gaza grinds on, Brazil is one of many countries facing increased fears about religious discrimination, particularly towards its Muslim community.
A survey released last month from the Anthropology Group on Islamic and Arab Contexts — an organisation based at the University of São Paulo — found that reports of harassment among Muslim Brazilians have been widespread since the war began.
An estimated 70 percent of respondents said they knew someone who experienced religious intolerance since October 7, when the Palestinian group Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel, killing 1,140 people.
Israel has since led a military offensive against Gaza, a Palestinian enclave, killing more than 21,000 people. That response has raised human rights concerns, with United Nations experts warning of a “grave risk of genocide”.
While Palestinians are an ethnic group — and not a religious one — the University of São Paulo’s Professor Francirosy Barbosa found that the events of October 7 resulted in incidents of religious intolerance in Brazil, as Palestinian identity was conflated with Muslim identity.
She led November’s survey of 310 Muslim Brazilians. Respondents, she explained, reported receiving insults that reflected tensions in the Gaza war.
“Many Muslim women told us they are now called things like ‘Hamas daughter’ or ‘Hamas terrorist’,” she told Al Jazeera.
The survey, conducted online, also found that many of the respondents also had firsthand experience with religious intolerance.
“About 60 percent of the respondents affirmed that they suffered some kind of offence, either on social media or in their daily lives at work, at home or in public spaces,” Barbosa said.
Women in particular, the study noted, reported slightly higher rates of religious intolerance.
A Palestinian Brazilian woman holds up a sign at a protest in Brasilia on October 20 that reads, ‘Muslim women of Brazil: anti-Zionism, anti-militarism, anti-extremism’ [File: Eraldo Peres/AP Photo]
The question of Islamophobia was catapulted into the national spotlight this month when a video spread on social media appearing to show a resident of Mogi das Cruzes, a suburb of São Paulo, rushing towards a Muslim woman and grabbing at her headscarf. The video was even broadcast on news outlets like CNN Brasil.
One of the women involved, Karen Gimenez Oubidi, who goes by Khadija, had married a Moroccan man and converted to Islam eight years ago. She told Al Jazeera that the altercation involved one of her neighbours: She was upset after their children had argued.
“She came down with her brother and was very aggressive. She called me a ‘cloth-wrapped bitch’. I soon realised it was not only about the kids’ fight,” Gimenez Oubidi said.
Neighbours attempted to separate the two women. One man in the video, however, grabbed Gimenez Oubidi from behind, wrapping an arm around her throat to hold her down. Gimenez Oubidi identified him to Al Jazeera as her neighbour’s brother.
Karen Gimenez Oubidi, known as Khadija, was the subject of a viral video that raised questions about Islamophobia [Courtesy of Karen Gimenez Oubidi]
“He said a few times to me, ‘What are you doing now, terrorist?’ He didn’t say it loudly: It was just for me to hear. He knew what he was doing,” Gimenez Oubidi said. She added that the fight her son had had with the neighbour’s child was also over her hijab.
The woman who attacked Oubidi, Fernanda — she said she did not want her full name revealed for fear of a public backlash — disputed this account.
Fernanda said her son had been hit by Oubidi’s son in the playground, and while she had physically attacked Fernanda, she had not referenced her religion. “I never insulted her for her religion. That simply didn’t happen. I’d never do something like that,” she said.
A government report from July noted that religious intolerance “occurs most intensely against those of African origin, but it also affects Indigenous, Roma, immigrant and converted individuals, including Muslims and Jews, as well as atheist, agnostic and non-religious people”.
Brazil is predominantly Christian, home to an estimated 123 million Catholics — more than any other country in the world.
But it has a long-standing, if smaller, Muslim population. Academics believe Islam arrived in the country with the transatlantic slave trade, as kidnapped African Muslims continued to practice their religion in their new surroundings.
One group of enslaved Muslim Brazilians even launched a rebellion against the government in 1835, called the Malê uprising — a term derived from the Yoruba word for Muslim.
Brazil’s Muslim population grew with waves of immigration in the late 19th and 20th centuries, particularly after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Arab immigrants, particularly from Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, came to know Brazil as their home.
The exact number of Muslims in Brazil today is unknown. The 2010 census counted 35,167 people identified as Muslim, but in the years since, other estimates have come out, setting the population as high as 1.5 million.
Some advocates, however, point to other demographic and political trends as setting the stage for tensions to rise between Muslim and non-Muslim groups.
Evangelical Christians make up the fastest-growing religious segment in Brazil today, comprising about a third of the population. Their numbers have turned them into a significant political force.
Evangelical voters were credited with helping to elect far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in 2016, with polls showing 70 percent supporting him.
During his failed 2022 re-election bid, Bolsonaro repeatedly invoked Christian imagery in his appeals to voters, framing the race as a “fight of good against evil”.
Mahmoud Ibrahim, who heads a mosque in Porto Alegre, believes that the us-versus-them mentality has translated into antagonism against his community.
A man marches in a religious freedom demonstration in 2022, holding a sign that reads, ‘I am a Muslim man. Ask me a question!!’ [File: Bruna Prado/AP Photo]
At recent protests against the war in Gaza, he said onlookers called him a “terrorist” and “child rapist”.
“Evangelicals and Bolsonarists insult us all the time. They even chased a person who was going to our demonstration the other day,” he said.
Ibrahim added that he had heard of at least one woman who was left bleeding after attackers attempted to tear her hijab off, causing the pins in the scarf to dig into her skin.
Girrad Sammour heads the National Association of Muslim Jurists (ANAJI), a group that offers legal support in cases of Islamophobia. He said the number of reports to ANAJI has always been high, but since the start of the war on October 7, it has exploded.
“There was a rise of 1,000 percent in the denunciations that we received,” he told Al Jazeera, crediting some to inflammatory remarks from far-right evangelical pastors.
But Barbosa, the survey leader, believes there are ways to lessen the hatred and suspicion directed at Muslim Brazilians. She pointed to a lack of media representation as an example.
“Few Palestinian leaders and experts in the Middle East with a pro-Palestine view have been invited by TV shows, for instance, to comment on the conflict in Gaza,” Barbosa said.
But she also encouraged Muslim Brazilians to speak up about their experiences, in order to raise awareness.
“What is not denounced doesn’t exist for the government,” she said. “Only if the authorities know what is happening will they be able to take adequate measures, like investing in education against religious intolerance.”
On December 14, I came across a report on the CNN website titled “Watch Clarissa Ward report from inside Gaza for the first time since war began”, which grabbed my attention, as good headlines usually do. The subheading further heightened my interest – “CNN’s Clarissa Ward witnessed the horror and humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza during a visit to a field hospital in Rafah operated by the United Arab Emirates”.
American journalists had not reported from within Gaza – except a few embedded with Israeli troops – because Israel, as the occupying power in control of the Gaza Strip’s borders, has been denying access to foreign journalists and putting pressure on Egypt to do so as well. So I was intrigued by how Ward had managed to gain access and saw her report as a chance to learn if such on-the-spot coverage would compensate for the broadly awful Western mainstream media coverage of the previous nine weeks.
Over the previous two months, I had observed heavily pro-Israeli, distorted, and incomplete coverage, especially on American television.
I saw most news presenters and show hosts expressing strong bias for Israel, in their words, tone of voice, and editorial choices. The predominance of military analyses by retired US senior officers was equally slanted towards Israel and against Hamas.
The flood of deeply human, personalised, warm, and emotional coverage of Israeli hostages and casualties contrasted with much shallower and fewer reports on the Palestinian victims and prisoners.
So I wondered, would the report from a field hospital in Gaza be better, more balanced, more human? So I clicked on the CNN story link to discover how it was reported from inside Gaza amid the mass murder and human suffering. What follows are a few observations of the strengths and weaknesses of the report. It is important to point them out as an example of the practices that plague the coverage of the Gaza war by most US media outlets.
The report’s strength is that CNN and Ward and her team made the effort to enter Gaza, see its human and material conditions for themselves, and share with the world the images, words, and emotions of a handful of Gaza Palestinians. I salute and thank them, and hope they prompt other journalists to enter Gaza by any possible safe means.
The report also exposes the viewers to the range of human suffering, fear, and helplessness that now defines Gaza. It offers snippets of the stories of a number of casualties, including young children and one orphaned toddler.
The video also captures the moment Israel bombs a location near the hospital; it demonstrates the frightening sensation of hearing and feeling the impact of a shell or bomb that Palestinians in Gaza experience on an hourly basis.
Ward maximises the powerful combination of images, quotes from people she interviews, and her own descriptions, which television at its best can do so well. She beautifully allows the viewer to feel what any visitor to the hospital would experience when she says that she feels “in every bed another gut punch”, as I did when I watched her report. She rightly calls Gaza’s mass suffering and non-stop death “one of the great horrors of modern warfare” and “a window onto hell”.
But elsewhere the report falls short of journalism’s responsibility to give audiences a reasonably complete picture of the situation on the ground in Gaza. Here are a few examples of how an extra sentence, phrase, or just a few words more would have let viewers grasp the full context of these hospitalised young Palestinians’ lives, amid the wider conflict’s causes, casualties, and participants.
Ward only mentions once, at the start, Israel’s more than 22,000 military strikes and their “intensity and ferocity”. But she fails to say that Israeli bombardment has been so indiscriminate and deadly that legal scholars consider what is happening in Gaza a genocide and there are several major legal cases in the US and Europe to stop it.
The report says that most patients are women and children, who also account for two of every three deaths. But it does not refer to the fact that Israel’s bombardment has resulted in more than 80,000 dead, injured and missing Palestinians, most of whom are civilians killed at home, in hospitals or United Nations-run schools turned into shelters.
The report mentions that the UAE hospital is taking patients from other medical facilities, which are overcrowded, but does not say why that is – because Israel has systematically bombed and raided most of Gaza’s hospitals to the point that they are out of service. It also makes no mention of the hundreds of medical workers Israel has killed, which has resulted in severe medical staff shortages.
The report points to the improvised tourniquet on one injured man rushed into the hospital, but it does not reveal that this is due to Israel blocking the delivery of life-saving and even basic medical supplies.
All the suffering humans who Ward interviews – with their amputated limbs, killed family members, broken bones, and disfigured faces – are mostly presented in passive, almost abstract, contexts that do not capture their full humanity or the full nature of the conflict. Consequently, most of the Palestinians we meet in the story seem like one-dimensional, caricature-like figures, expressing only fear, misery, and worry. We the audience mostly feel sorry for the Palestinians, but we do not really know them, because no other emotions beyond pity link us to them.
We are told that one of the patients – 20-year-old Lama, who lost her leg – was studying to be an engineer. But we are not informed that Israel has not only broken her body but her dreams, having devastated Gaza’s universities, making it impossible for Gaza’s youth to pursue higher education in the years ahead.
The report makes clear that Lama and her family fled their home upon Israel’s orders, but then were bombed in the home where they sought refuge. But we are not told that 80 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million population have been displaced and are living in appalling conditions, made that much worse by Israel’s full blockade that has cut off food, electricity, water, and medicine.
The report discusses Gaza in the context of other conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, but does not mention this as the latest episode of Israel’s 75-year-long and ongoing ethnic cleansing, colonisation, and occupation of Palestinians. It does not refer to the fact that the majority of Gaza residents are refugees or descendants of refugees who were forced to flee their homes by Jewish militias in 1948 to avoid being killed.
While the report mentions that Israel and Egypt have made access to Gaza “next to impossible”, it appears to indicate that this is so because of the danger from Israeli bombardment. This justification is rather bizarre given the fact that Western journalists have been all over the front lines in the war in Ukraine, where they face Russian bombardment. The report avoids saying that foreign journalists are barred from Gaza because Israel wants to control the narrative of the war.
I do not personally know Clarissa Ward, but I have known many CNN correspondents since the channel’s earliest days, and I know they are sincere professionals who aim to do quality journalism. So my comments are not directed at the correspondent or CNN as a whole, but rather seek to highlight the weaknesses of such reports that mirror much of the US’s flawed coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza.
I raise the issue of poor media coverage of our region because in the United States, United Kingdom, and other Western countries, I’ve seen the damage it has caused by promoting Israeli and Western governments’ views above all others.
Since the media is the public’s main source of information on the Middle East, biased reporting over many decades has created a misinformed citizenry. This has perpetuated government support for Israel’s colonial apartheid system, which now wants to expel into the Sinai Peninsula more Palestinians from Gaza. This in turn allows Israel to resist any serious peacemaking efforts and refuse to comply with international legal norms. The result is the chronic and ever more gruesome warfare that we witness these days.
Our common struggle to create a world of justice and peace goes on. We in the journalism world should step up quickly and forcefully to play a constructive role by using the tools we know so well to communicate truths across frontiers.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
At least 100 killed in central Gaza, while night-time raids injure 17 in occupied West Bank – here is the latest.
Here’s how things stand on Sunday, December 31, 2023:
Latest updates and human impact:
Israeli military attacks on homes in central Gaza have killed at least 100 people and wounded 286 in less than 24 hours, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
The continuing Israeli bombardment has now destroyed more than 70 percent of Gaza’s homes, the Government Media Office says.
The occupied West Bank saw another night of raids and drone attacks as at least 17 Palestinians were wounded in Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps.
There is a growing exodus of displaced Palestinians into the far southern town of Rafah, with some 100,000 fleeing there in just a few days, according to the United Nations.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel should control the border zone between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Egypt has rejected the prospect of ceding this territory to Israel.
Twenty-three Syrian fighters have been killed by air raids believed to be waged by Israeli forces, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, as hostilities build between Israel and Iran-aligned groups in the region.
Israel also traded strikes with Hezbollah. The Lebanese group claimed four attacks on Israeli territory over the past day, while Israeli strikes killed at least one Hezbollah fighter.
The Palestine Public Broadcasting Corporation strongly condemned Israel for reportedly hacking a local radio station and broadcasting “threatening messages” to Gaza residents already traumatised by war.
In Gaza, at least 21,822 people have been killed and 56,451 injured in Israeli attacks since October 7. The revised death toll from Hamas’s attack on Israel stands at 1,139.
Diplomacy:
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation welcomed South Africa’s decision to file a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), saying that the charge is warranted because of Israel’s “indiscriminate targeting of the civilian population”.
Several genocide experts also welcomed the move, with British war crimes prosecutor Geoffrey Nice telling Al Jazeera it is a “courageous” step.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked the administration of US President Joe Biden for its continued backing during the war, including approval of a new emergency weapons sale, the second this month.
Foreign Minister Eli Cohen told Israeli media that the government bears some responsibility for failing to prevent Hamas’s attack on October 7. He called for an investigation committee to be formed to hold those who were “negligent” accountable.
Israel is prepared to let ships deliver aid to Gaza “immediately” through a proposed sea corridor from Cyprus, according to Cohen.
Commercial vessels targeted in the Red Sea:
Yemen’s Houthi rebels waged multiple attacks on a container ship owned by global shipping giant Maersk, according to the US military, prompting the firm to suspend operations in the Red Sea for 48 hours.
In the last alleged Houthi attack on the Maersk ship, US helicopters responded to and fired at attacking Houthi boats, sinking three of them and killing several crew, according to the United States Central Command.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron said he conveyed to Iran’s foreign minister that Tehran shares “shares responsibility for preventing these attacks, given their longstanding support to the Houthis”.
I spoke to @Amirabdolahian today about Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, which threaten innocent lives and the global economy. I made clear that Iran shares responsibility for preventing these attacks given their long-standing support to the Houthis.
Activists are asking people to turn the New Year’s countdown in their countries into a countdown for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Activists have launched a global campaign asking people to turn the New Year’s countdown in their countries into a countdown for a ceasefire in Gaza, which has been under devastating Israeli bombardment since October 7.
“New Year’s Eve is a moment of celebration worldwide, and an opportunity to create resolutions for a brighter future. With nearly 30,000 civilians killed, including over 10,000 children, our only New Year’s resolution is to call for a permanent ceasefire,” Countdown2Ceasefire, a London-based grassroots campaign, said in a statement on Thursday.
“Our aim is to morph the traditional New Year’s countdown into an influential and resounding countdown for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.”
So far the campaign has successfully been embraced by activists in over 30 countries, including Switzerland, Turkiye, Malaysia, Australia, Tanzania, Mexico and Germany, according to the organisers.
While ringing in the new year, these local events calling for a ceasefire will be livestreamed across Countdown2ceasefire’s social media platforms.
Israeli bombings have destroyed more than 70 percent of Gaza homes [File: Ariel Schalit/AP Photo]
“A permanent ceasefire is the first step in ending the current deplorable situation and a tangible move towards a future where traumatised communities can rebuild and recover,” Bushra Mohammad, a campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Israel’s brutal military offensive in Gaza has killed more than 21,500 people and wounded more than 55,000 others triggering a global outrage, with protesters across the world rallying to call for a ceasefire. Many have also expressed their disappointment towards politicians and countries who vetoed or abstained from voting for a ceasefire at the United Nations.
Rights organisations including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders also condemned countries vetoing a ceasefire, warning that this would result in a humanitarian disaster.
Israel has refused to stop the bombing that has destroyed more than 70 percent of Gaza homes and displaced more than 90 percent of the enclave’s 2.3 million people.
Countdown2Ceasefire pointed out how people power can make a difference.
“As we enter 2024, we look forward to it being the year that our New Year’s resolution, of a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, is fulfilled.”
Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza for nearly three months has destroyed 70 percent of the homes in the besieged Palestinian enclave, according to the Government Media Office.
No further details were provided but an earlier report said more than 200 heritage and archaeological sites were destroyed in the Israeli bombardment considered the most destructive in modern history.
About 300,000 out of 439,000 homes have been destroyed in Israeli attacks, a Wall Street Journal report said. Analysing satellite imagery, the report added that the 29,000 bombs dropped on the strip have targeted residential areas, Byzantine churches, hospitals and shopping malls and all civilian infrastructure has been damaged to an extent that they cannot be repaired.
“The word ‘Gaza’ is going to go down in history along with Dresden [Germany] and other famous cities that have been bombed,” Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has written about the history of aerial bombing, told WSJ.
In nearly two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol, or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the United States-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the ISIL (ISIS) group.
Between 1942 and 1945, the Allies attacked 51 major German cities and towns, destroying about 40-50 percent of their urban areas, Pape told The Associated Press news agency.
“Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” said Pape. “It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.”
Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University told the AP, “Gaza is now a different colour from space. It’s a different texture.”
Deadliest in recent history
The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, also now sits among the deadliest in recent history, killing more than 21,500 people and wounding 55,000. More than 1,000 children had their limbs amputated in the Israeli attacks since October 7.
The Israeli army claims it has been targeting Hamas fighters, who carried out a deadly attack inside Israel on October 7. Some 1,200 people were killed in that attack which triggered the current phase of the conflict.
Hamas says its attack was in response to continued Israeli blockade of Gaza and expansion of settlement in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinians see the Israeli settlements – which are considered illegal under international law – to be the biggest hurdle in the realisation of their future state.
The level of destruction is so high because “Hamas is very entrenched within the civilian population”, Efraim Inbar, head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, a think tank, told the AP.
But experts have criticised Israel for bombing Gaza – which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world housing 2.3 million people on 365sq km (141sq miles) of land.
Media reports and rights groups say an overwhelming majority of those killed are civilians – more than 70 percent of them children, women and elderly. More than 90 percent of the enclave’s population is now displaced, with aid groups warning of hunger and outbreaks of disease. Delivery of aid has been restricted by Israel worsening the crisis.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military has said little about what kinds of bombs and artillery it is using in Gaza. From blast fragments found on-site and analyses of strike footage, experts are confident that the vast majority of bombs dropped on the besieged enclave are US-made. They say the weapons include 2,000-pound (900kg) “bunker-busters” that have killed hundreds in densely populated areas.
US news network CNN reported on December 14 that about half of all the Israeli munitions dropped on Gaza were imprecise “dumb” bombs, which pose a greater threat to civilians.
Earlier this week, an Israeli military official admitted that the high death toll from a Christmas Eve attack on a refugee camp in central Gaza was the result of the use of improper munitions, highlighting military tactics that have created high numbers of civilian casualties.
The Israeli news outlet +972 also previously reported that the Israeli military has loosened its standards regarding acceptable civilian harm from attacks, resulting in a higher portion of civilians killed than in previous rounds of military assaults.
Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of using banned white phosphorous. Israel has denied the claims.
The Israeli army has reiterated that every strike is cleared by legal advisers to make sure it complies with international law.
“We choose the right munition for each target – so it doesn’t cause unnecessary damage,” said the army’s chief spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.
The Israeli prime minister also predicts the war in Gaza and on other regional fronts would last many months.
The border zone between the Gaza Strip and Egypt should be under Israel’s control, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said, as he predicted the war in the Palestinian enclave and on other regional fronts would last many months.
As Israel entered the 13th week of its war in Gaza on Saturday, Netanyahu held a news conference where he renewed his promise to eliminate Hamas and bring home all Israelis held captive in Gaza.
“The Philadelphi Corridor – or to put it more correctly, the southern stoppage point [of Gaza] – must be in our hands. It must be shut. It is clear that any other arrangement would not ensure the demilitarisation that we seek,” he said.
Israel has said it intends to destroy Hamas in Gaza and demilitarise the territory to prevent any repeat of the October 7 cross-border killing and kidnapping spree by the armed group.
“The war is at its height. We are fighting on all of the fronts. Achieving victory will require time. As the [Israeli army] chief of staff has said, the war will continue for many more months,” Netanyahu said.
He also added a rare threat to attack Iran directly over the near-daily exchanges of fire across the Israel-Lebanon border.
“If [the Iran-backed Lebanese armed group] Hezbollah expands the warfare, it will suffer blows that it has not dreamed of – and so too Iran,” Netanyahu said without elaborating.
The war has triggered fears of a regional conflagration amid rising tensions with other Iranian-aligned groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Israel’s relentless bombing and ground offensive on Gaza since October 7 has killed at least 21,672 people, most of them women and children, with thousands of others buried under the rubble.
The military operation has also displaced almost the entire 2.3 million population of the besieged territory.
About 1,140 people were killed by Hamas in Israel in the October 7 attacks.
Syrian defence ministry says the ‘aerial aggression’ came from the Mediterranean and hit a number of places.
Israel has targeted Iranian military positions in Syria’s Aleppo with an air raid, causing some material damage, according to the Syrian Ministry of Defence.
“Israel carried out an aerial aggression from the direction of the Mediterranean Sea, west of Latakia, targeting a number of points south of the city of Aleppo,” the statement said on Saturday.
The Syrian state media, citing a military source, said “the Israeli enemy carried out an air attack… targeting a number of points south of the city of Aleppo” at about 5:20pm (14:20 GMT) on Saturday.
Pro-government radio station Sham FM said the attacks were near Aleppo’s airport, but did not damage it.
“It seems these attacks in Aleppo were conducted from the sea,” Al Jazeera’s Ali Hashem reported from Naqoura in southern Lebanon.
“Warplanes were situated over the Mediterranean when they launched the missiles towards several targets in the city of Aleppo.”
During more than a decade of war in Syria, Israel has launched hundreds of air raids on its territory, primarily targeting Iran-backed forces including Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, as well as Syrian army positions.
But Israel intensified its attacks since its military operation in Gaza began on October 7, causing tensions across the Middle East.
Hashem said the Aleppo attack was “not unprecedented”.
“On several occasions, there were attacks on Aleppo, on Damascus, and yesterday [Friday] there was an attack on Albu Kamal, an area on the border between Syria and Iraq,” he said.
“It seems this is part of a pattern, because the group that was linked to Albu Kamal was linked to the Iranian IRGC commander who was killed in Damascus just days ago,” he added.
On Monday, an Israeli air raid outside the Syrian capital Damascus killed a senior adviser in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Sayyed Razi Mousavi was responsible for coordinating the military alliance between Syria and Iran.
Tit-for-tat on Israel-Lebanon border
The attack on Aleppo came after another Israeli air raid on a border town in southern Lebanon earlier on Saturday.
The attack followed Iran-backed group Hezbollah claiming responsibility for three attacks on Israeli military bases on the border, Al Jazeera’s Hashem reported.
“There were several Israeli air raids mainly on the town of Bint Jbeil … According to reports, there are no casualties,” he said.
“Another town closer to the border of Israel was also hit by an Israeli attack in a residential area. This raises the risk of civilian casualties on a daily basis,” he said.
Israel and Hezbollah, along with a handful of smaller armed groups that operate in southern Lebanon, have settled into a steady rhythm of tit-for-tat exchanges since the Gaza assault began.
At least 21,672 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed in Gaza in nearly three months of Israeli operation, which has also displaced nearly the strip’s entire 2.3 million population.
The attacks in Syria and Lebanon also come amid fears that Israel’s war in Gaza could expand into a wider regional conflict.
David Frum, writer for The Atlantic magazine and pro-Israel commentator, says Palestinian statehood is not the solution.
David Frum, staff writer for The Atlantic magazine and a pro-Israel supporter, tells host Steve Clemons that Israel and the United States should “avoid solution-ism” for the Palestinians and focus on day-to-day necessities, like food and water.
The way Israel has responded to the Hamas attack of October 7 was “inevitable”, Frum says, adding that “Israel has never been allowed this much scope to act”, by the US, United Kingdom and European Union.
Join this wide-ranging conversation on the internal debates within Israeli society, and how Israel envisions the future of the region, including rapprochement with Saudi Arabia.
Exploring how Instagram and TikTok influencers shape narratives in Israel’s war on Gaza.
Social media has revolutionised our understanding and perception of wars and conflicts.
Platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, with their real-time, unfiltered content, offer a new perspective that’s immediate and often raw.
These platforms enable users worldwide to witness conflicts like the war on Gaza as they unfold, offering a variety of viewpoints that traditional media may not cover.
This shift has led to a more multifaceted and grassroots-level narrative, one which we will explore as influencers Nicole Jenes and Rathbone talk to Al Jazeera.
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