Several coalition government ministers have called for the establishment of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. On Monday, a UN worker was killed in an attack on a vehicle in the Gaza Strip. All developments here in the news ticker.
Wednesday, May 15, 2:59 a.m.: According to information from government circles, the US government of President Joe Biden informed Congress on Tuesday (local time) about an arms delivery to Israel worth around one billion dollars (around 920 million euros). Congress still needs to approve the weapons package, a US government official said.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on the new weapons package. It could include $700 million for tank ammunition and $500 million for tactical vehicles.
11:46 p.m.: According to the Israeli army, a civilian was killed in the Israeli border area in a rocket attack from Lebanon. On the northern border, a civilian in the Adamit kibbutz community was killed by an anti-tank missile on Tuesday, said army spokesman Daniel Hagari. According to the army, several anti-tank missile launches from Lebanon have been “identified”. Accordingly, five soldiers were injured, most of them slightly.
During the day, the Israeli army attacked dozens of Hezbollah militia targets in Lebanon, Hagari said. Meanwhile, Lebanese state media reported that two people in a car in southern Lebanon were killed in an Israeli drone strike on Tuesday evening.
8:12 p.m.: UN Secretary-General António Guterres said he was “horrified” by the Israeli military offensive in the southern Gaza Strip. “These developments further complicate humanitarian access and worsen an already dire situation. At the same time, Hamas continues to fire rockets indiscriminately. Civilians must be respected and protected at all times, in Rafah and elsewhere in Gaza,” Guterres spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said on Tuesday. An immediate humanitarian ceasefire, the release of all hostages, the opening of the Rafah border crossing and unhindered humanitarian access to the entire Gaza Strip are needed. The Israeli army advanced on the city of Rafah from the east a week ago and has since then also controlled the Palestinian part of the border crossing into Egypt. Allies such as the USA had repeatedly warned Israel against a major ground offensive, particularly because of the feared consequences for the civilian population. Until last week, around a million people had sought protection from fighting in the rest of the Gaza Strip in Rafah. According to UN estimates, almost 450,000 people left Rafah within a week.
4:58 p.m.: According to media reports, several ministers from the right-wing national and right-wing extremist parties in the coalition government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for the establishment of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip at a demonstration. They therefore took part in a rally in Sderot, southern Israel, near the Gaza Strip, where several thousand representatives of the extreme right had gathered.
“We must return to Gaza now,” Police Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir reportedly said. This is the only true solution. “We are returning home to the holy land. And secondly, we must encourage voluntary emigration of Gazans.”
Parts of the Israeli right are pursuing the dream of “Greater Israel,” which refers to an Israeli state including the Palestinian territories – that is, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The justification is the divine promise mentioned in the Bible to give the land of Canaan to the people of Israel.
Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, who belongs to Netanyahu’s Likud party, also reportedly called for repopulating the Gaza Strip with security forces and settlers to “preserve the security gains for which our soldiers lost their lives.” This would “eradicate the shame.” , which was linked to the abandonment of Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip in 2005.
8:19 a.m.: A member of the UN security services was killed in an attack on a vehicle in the Gaza Strip on Monday. It is the first death among United Nations international employees in the Palestinian territory since October 7, said a UN spokesman. UN Secretary-General António Guterres was “deeply saddened to learn of the death of a United Nations Department for Safety and Security (UNDSS) employee and the injury of another DSS employee,” said Guterres’ deputy spokesman Farhan Haq.
Accordingly, the workers’ UN vehicle was hit while they were on the way to the European Hospital in Rafah. The spokesman did not provide any information about the nationality of the man killed.
Haq also drew attention to the approximately 190 Palestinian UN employees who have been killed since October 7th – most of them employees of the UN Palestinian relief agency UNRWA. “The UN Secretary-General condemns all attacks on UN personnel and calls for a full investigation,” he said.
According to Israeli information, in its major attack on Israel on October 7th, the Islamist Palestinian organization Hamas killed around 1,170 people and kidnapped around 250 as hostages in the Gaza Strip. Since then, Israel has taken massive military action in the Gaza Strip. According to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health, which cannot be independently verified, more than 35,000 people have now been killed.
5:30 a.m.: Arab mediators are now hoping to narrow the gap between the two parties to the conflict, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing Egyptian officials. They were expected to meet again for talks this week in Doha, the capital of Qatar, it was reported. A recent round of negotiations in the Egyptian capital Cairo was unsuccessful. Since Israel and Hamas do not negotiate directly with each other, Egypt, Qatar and the USA act as mediators. Meanwhile, the Israeli army expanded its attacks in the Gaza Strip to areas where the military had already been deployed. On Monday, there were again fierce battles in various places in the north, center and south of the sealed-off coastal area, including in the city of Rafah, which borders Egypt.
4:50 a.m.: According to the UN, almost 360,000 people have fled the city, which is overcrowded with internally displaced people, since the army advanced into Rafah. Israel is exerting military pressure on Hamas in Rafah to secure the release of the hostages and dismantle four battalions of the Islamist organization. “We are close to destroying the remaining Hamas battalions,” Netanyahu said in a podcast recorded on Sunday. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated, according to a spokesman, that the US remains opposed to a major ground offensive in Rafah, where more than a million people had sought refuge from the fighting in the rest of the Gaza Strip until last week.
Tuesday, May 14, 2:45 a.m.: “We do not believe that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide,” US President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Monday in Washington. “We have always firmly rejected this claim.” Sullivan said the US had also presented its position on this issue in writing and in detail before the International Court of Justice. At the same time, he emphasized: “We believe that Israel can and must do more to ensure the protection and well-being of innocent civilians.”
According to media reports, Israel’s Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi had previously complained that, due to the lack of a political strategy for the post-war period, the army had to keep fighting in places in Gaza from which it had already withdrawn. Israel is well on its way to inheriting an uprising with many armed Hamas fighters, US Secretary of State Blinken said on US television on Sunday. There is a risk of a vacuum that will be filled by chaos, anarchy and probably by Hamas.
19.02: According to a spokesman, the Islamist Hamas has lost contact with the guards of four Israeli hostages in the Gaza Strip in the past ten days following Israeli air strikes. Among these hostages was the US-Israeli Hersch Goldberg-Polin, a spokesman for the Qassam Brigades – the military wing of the Islamist Hamas – wrote on the Telegram news channel. Goldberg-Polin was seen on a Hamas propaganda video about two weeks ago. When and under what circumstances it was made remains unknown.
It was the first sign of life for the 23-year-old, who was captured by Hamas terrorists on October 7th as one of the visitors to the Nova music festival and kidnapped to the Gaza Strip.
You can read more about the Iranian attack on Israel on the next page. .