 And welcome, you're watching I-24 News coming to you from Tel Aviv on this day 84 of the war with Hamas. Sirens blared in both northern and southern Israel this Friday. The IDF says it carried out an extensive strike in southern Lebanon targeting launch positions and a Hezbollah military compound. Saudi media is reporting that an Israeli airstrike killed 11 members of Iran's revolutionary guards in Damascus. The article claims the attack has a greater impact than the U.S. assassination of the IRGC general Kassem Soleimani several years ago. And in Gaza, the IDF expands its operations in the south, destroying tunnels and seizing weapons including from the homes of terrorists who carried out the October 7th massacre in Kibbutz near Oz. Well, for the very latest on the fighting in Gaza, we can go now to southern Israel. Our senior correspondent Pierre Kloshendler is close to the border with Gaza. Pierre, the IDF says it has been expanding its operations in the south of the strip. What's happening? Right. Right now we just saw two missiles fired from a gunship, an Apache gunship just over our head in the direction of southern Gaza city, probably in the neighborhoods of Al-Tufah and Daraj, which are the site of a ground offensive for the last stronghold of Hamas held by a battalion facing the 162 division of the IDF. Behind me is the direction of El-Burej, El-Muassi, and Nusairah, the three refugee camps in central Gaza Strip. We know that there's heavy fighting on the northern and eastern outskirts of El-Burej since Sunday when the 36th division of the IDF started confronting the battalion of El-Burej. In each of the three refugee camps, there is a battalion of Hamas which is still more or less intact. According to the IDF further south in Hanyunes, there's been an addition of two division of two, sorry, brigades. And right now there are seven brigades operating in and out of Hanyunes with the 98th division of elite commando units operating in the heart of Hanyunes. And what they do is what they've been doing all the time since December 2nd when they started to invade Hanyunes, they're neutralizing tunnel shafts, trying to map out the network of tunnels where, according to their estimate, the political and military leadership of Hamas is hiding probably with hostages as well. The city is completely encircled in order to prevent from the terrorists, the leadership, and also the hostages to move south to the city of Rafah, which has not been taken over by the IDF. And it sits on the Israeli-Egyptian border. And that's a critical point because there are smuggling tunnels underneath the border between Gaza and Egypt. And the fear, of course, would be that the leadership of Hamas as well as the hostages would be smuggled out of the Gaza Strip to the Sinai Peninsula. And that would be even harder for the IDF to try and retrieve those hostages. Now, in the outskirts of Hanyunes, on the eastern outskirts, on the border with Israel, there is a community called Ahudaha. And from that community, the Al-Nurbah Commando units of Hamas perpetrated probably the worst massacre, apart from the Raif Party in Kibbutz Niroz, where half of the population of this community was either massacred or kidnapped and held hostage into the Gaza Strip. There is one whole brigade right now, which is operating in Al-Hudaha with fierce clashes in order to dismantle the infrastructure of Hamas there. Laura? Yeah, thank you very much indeed. Pierre Clashendler there with the latest on the fighting in Gaza. Well, with me in the studio this hour, Amir Oran is a defense and government commentator. Laura? Good to see you. Amir, thank you for being with us. So we just heard the latest on the IDF operation inside Gaza. They're expanding their operations in the south with a focus on the border with Egypt. It is exacting a very high price in terms of civilian casualties and also 168 IDF troops have now fallen in the fighting. Regrettably, that's very true. This is a sort of a war of attrition, almost a quagmire for Israel, because for the last four weeks, today is Friday the 13th, not the 13th day, but tomorrow starts the 13th week of the war, and results are yet to be seen. Now, there are many small and minor and accumulative achievements, but they do not add up to a big achievement which could justify the entire investment. What is such an achievement? Either the capture or killing of the very top of the Hamas leadership, such as Yahya Sinwar or Mohamed Def, and or the rescue of most of the hostages. So four weeks after the resumption of the operations following a one-week ceasefire, nothing of that type has been achieved. And this is why there is now growing American pressure on Israel to transition from this phase to a less intensive one. Okay, all right, we'll come back to that in a moment, but let's go first to the north of Israel where sirens have been blaring around the largely evacuated communities close to the border with Lebanon. Our Zach Anders is with us and joins us now. So Zach, the idea has been striking his border positions inside Lebanon today. They have, and in the last week it appears these strikes have reached further inside southern Lebanon in an attempt to weaken Hezbollah's resolve and tighten the, or rather, target the network of weapons and resources that they have throughout the south. These strikes in the last few months since October 7th had been limited, fairly limited to the area very close around the border, but in the last week, week and a half, we've seen these strikes from the air pick up considerably at a distance trying to strike several kilometers past that border and it appears that today has been no different. With a handful of these strikes, an unconfirmed amount, we're still working to put together some of these details because the IDF has not been releasing the exacts or the specifics of where they've been hitting, but relying on some of the media that's being posted inside Lebanon, some of the reportage that's coming out of that country has shown considerable strikes that are, again, deep inside the country and numerous enough so that the chatter that's reaching throughout that media network has been them seeing a considerable escalation and the discussion has moved to the next phase for them as they see these continued strikes inflicting quite a heavy toll over now 130 confirmed Hezbollah deaths as they've self-reported, but as many as 170 across this conflict in southern Lebanon and inside southern Syria when you consider the other factions involved, both Hamas, Palestinian Islamic jihad and other groups that are operating both in southern Lebanon and southern Syria, nearly 180 have been killed. And Zach, talk us through another unconfirmed airstrike. This is a Saudi report which claimed that Israel killed 11 senior members of the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, in Damascus. And it's coming after another strike in Damascus killed another senior IRGC leader several days before. This strike appears to have come after the funeral service for this senior leader. And the day after, rather, this happening inside Damascus, the IDF has not confirmed their involvement in this strike, but we have seen the IDF admit to being involved in airstrikes inside Damascus before in the last several weeks. So this is not outside the scope of their control. One of the questions being what is happening with Syrian air defenses and the Syrian air force that continue to allow non-state, their non-other state actors, rather, to strike deep inside the country and at the center, the network of power inside Syria. It should be noted that inside Syria not only has the IRGC seen now fatalities, but Syrian army soldiers have been killed as well. So they're very much involved in this conflict as they host a numerous amount of different factions and political groups within that country that continue to target Israel. Zach, thank you very much indeed. And just to update earlier today, there was a car ramming attack in the West Bank. Three Israelis were wounded and it's now emerged that five soldiers were also wounded in that attack. One of them seriously, the assailant was killed at the scene. All right, well, Amir Oren is with me in the studio. So you're not particularly impressed with the military operation in Gaza so far. How do you rate the IDF response to that other threat in the north? So a word about Gaza, what the Israeli Defense Forces and the intelligence community knew or believed they know beforehand was two-dimensional. They could have pictured, for instance, the tunnels. But when they reached them, when they saw the real thing, it turned out to be three-dimensional. It's wide, it's deep, it's long. And if you had the fourth dimension time, it's very complicated. Now up north, Israel and Hezbollah have other measurements for each side's achievements. We just had Zach count the number of Hezbollah casualties, either the 120 or so or 170. This does not degrade the real power of Hezbollah. It takes some of it and the airstrikes take some of their assets. But the fact that Hezbollah is still preventing thousands upon thousands of Israeli residents of the northern communities from coming home and is systematically destroying their homes by these anti-tank missiles, that means that Israel is not winning this fight either. And just a quick word on Gaza. I mean, Israel says it's killed upwards of 8,000 terrorists, it's destroyed tunnels, it's seized weapons. I mean, did Israel have any other choice that's going to Gaza? No, but this does not mean that you can measure success by these figures because if you are fighting an army, let's say a division of 10,000 soldiers, and you kill a wound or capture 3,000 of them, the division is no longer operative. But in a terrorist organization, and there are 40,000, the war started out with 40,000 Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic jihad terrorists. If you killed one quarter of them, there are still 30,000 who are going to hide in the rubble, not only in tunnels, and keep pestering the occupying force. Well, we have been warned, haven't we, that this is going to be a long drawn-out war. But I want to talk about the politics. Politics is going back into frame. The former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has defended himself after he drew fire for revealing in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that he ordered strikes on Iran when he was in power back in 2022. Officials say those statements were not cleared by the military censor, widely seen as a criticism of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Bennett said that recent governments had talked and sermonized about Iran, but had not exacted a painful price. Well, the current Defense Minister Yav Galant has responded to those comments by Bennett. Take a listen. I just wrapped up a visit to the Ramat-David Air Base. I want to express total appreciation for the Air Force's performance, for the fighters in the air and on the ground, and for their cooperation. The operations of the Air Force in all sectors is very impressive, and it's fitting that the roar of the jets drown out the superfluous talk and allow IDF forces to carry out their mission quietly and securely. I want to say to anyone who hears us, we are engaged in intensified operations in the Gaza Strip, and they will continue for an extended period until the objectives are achieved. These operations are currently centered on Khan Yunus. The achievements are precise, impressive, and the results are not far behind. That's the Defense Minister Yav Galant there. So, I mean, the polls show that under Netanyahu, Likud would get around 15 seats in the 120-member Knesset. Are we seeing now politicians kind of popping their head up and jostling? Of course, it's all politics. Let me supply you with a trivia detail. The Ramat-David, Ramat-David base which Galant visited, is not named after King David or David Mingurion, but rather David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister of World War I. Now, what happened last year is ancient history. What Bennett did in ordering Mossad or the IDF to kill this Iranian operative or another one, or to strike at a plant inside Iran is immaterial. When Netanyahu was in office, he revealed too many details about Israeli assassination attempts and successes and the heist of the archive from Tehran. This was much more humiliating to the Iranians, and there is no problem with what Bennett just said. But yes, the polls are showing that Bennett, who left office quite dejected, did not even try to run in the elections, has a political resurrection of sorts, at least in the polls. What happens in the election will probably be many disappointed Likud voters deserting their party, choosing Bennett as a right-wing candidate over whoever succeeded Netanyahu. But again, this could be a one-time affair. All right, Amir, thank you very much. Amir Oran there. Well, meanwhile, over in Ukraine, the government has reported the biggest Russian assault on its territory since the war began nearly two years ago. At least 26 people were killed and 120 injured in multiple missile attacks, which targeted Kyiv, Lviv, Dnipro, Odessa, Kharkiv, and elsewhere in the country as well. NATO member Poland, meanwhile, says everything indicates a Russian missile briefly entered its airspace Friday morning. We're here to talk about all of that. Dr. Hannah Schelles is the Director of Security Programs at the Foreign Policy Council, Ukrainian Prism. Thank you very much for being with us, Dr. Schelles. So this is the largest attack by air since the Russian invasion began. Why is this happening now? That being quite unexpected, because for the last few months, Russia has been accumulating the long-range missiles. So we were expecting that around the holidays, when the winter is really coming, Russia will try to damage the energy system, the same as they did the last year. However, we had quite a warm December first. Then for the last months, they've been testing with the Iranian drones, the effectiveness of the air defense system, plus the news about the F-16 delivery that should happen this or next week, being constantly in news. So for the Russian Federation, that's been the very proper psychological moment, first of all, because they accumulated what is necessary, the forces they tested the ground. They included a lot of the psychological and information warfare at the same time, and they attacked just early in the morning when everybody is having their holidays. But that being quite a sophisticated attack and well-prepared, we definitely can see it from the trajectory of the missiles. Meanwhile, Poland says that it was most probably a Russian missile, sorry, that entered its airspace today. That is NATO airspace, that is European Union airspace. This would be a significant escalation, wouldn't it? That is not the first time when the Russian either drones or missiles are crossing the territory of the NATO member state. If we remember in the summer, the Russian drones crossed the Romanian territory and even exploded there, because the border is so close when you target the ports of Ismail, for example, that is just 200 meters through the river to the territory of Romania. When you target the city of Lviv, that is just 40 minutes drive by car to the Polish border. And when you target some of the bases like Clouder to the border, you have very, very short distance, and we need to understand that the Russian precise or so-called precise missiles very often are not so precise. So there were incidents in the past where they crossed the territory. For example, the territory of Moldova several times the missiles been crossing when they tried to target Odessa or Vinitsa regions. However, the question is was it deliberately or was it just the quality of the Russian missiles? And that is the question that now probably the Polish intelligence is trying to respond. A lot of comparisons have been made with the war in Ukraine and the war here. In terms of public opinion, how do people view the war Israel is currently waging against Hamas? You know, that's definitely since the 7 of October Israel being constantly in the Ukrainian news, and that is the shared pain for the terrorist actions and just the war crimes happening on the ground. So in this case, you could see everything from the discussions to the media to the big boards that appeared with the Israeli flag in October this year. But at the same time, that's definitely discussions about will the events in Israel take attention first to all of the American Congress from what is happening in Ukraine. Will it means that Ukraine should receive less support from our international partners? I mean, that's not the way of jealousy. It's more of the pragmatic practical because Ukraine is trying to understand how much we can rely on our partners, how much we're dependent on our partners. But in general, if you ask about the general public, that is just the moral support of the Israeli and the desire this war is over. But also yet one probably moment that I need to emphasize, a lot of people are discussing that for the international community, we need to speak that the same actors are involved in both cases. We know the Iranian role, Iranian weapons supply to Russia and then to Ukraine and Iranian supplies to Hamas. The same is about the role of Russia because we understand that their position regarding the current events is Israel is also quite a dubious if to be soft and politically correct. So that's more of the strategic level. Discussions are happening. Should Ukraine and Israel speak more publicly together about the same actors who are the real spoilers of these wars? Dr. Hannah Shelis, thank you very much indeed. One more now on the similarities between the war in Ukraine and Israel's war with Hamas. Robert Swift has this report. The Israel-Gaza fence was protected by some of the best border security technology in the world. Remote gun turrets, underground sensors to detect tunneling and surveillance bloons. The after barrier was built on the assumption that we have a very technology singing, visiting the other thing that we will tell us when someone is approaching the fence. This one collapsed. Hamas simply went through it with demolition charges and pickup trucks, overwhelming the defences with force of numbers and a few drones. Believing that its high-tech defences sufficed, Israel let other more basic considerations fall by the wayside. Israel adopted in the last, I think, 20 years a symmetric balance between technology and the number of units' main power that it needs on the field. It looks like Israel thought in its calculation that the high technology will bring advantage to the battlefield instead of represent of main power inside it. Since the October 7th attack, a number of former Israeli generals have argued for an expanded IDF budget and footprint. Ukraine, fighting on a very different battlefield, also sees its manning levels as a problem. Unfortunately, main power is still super important because we get back to the scales of massive armies, of million strong armies which is absolutely weird, which is absolutely unnatural to the state of our modern society. Locked in a stalemate with a larger foe, its chief of staff argues that advances in technologies like electronic warfare are needed to break the deadlock. In the 21st century, the development of science and as a result the advancement of armaments and military equipment inevitably led to the changes in the tactics of its use. The enemy didn't stay behind either. You see what is happening specifically in the last few days. We have a powerful confrontation specifically in the technological aspect. Both of the wars defining 2023 show a blurring of low and high technologies on the battlefield. In Ukraine, the first large example of state-on-state drone warfare, the Hawitzer, the Shovel and the Trench as seen on the fields of the First World War, are as important as the quadcopter. And in Gaza, urban siege warfare reminiscent of Stalingrad is being waged by the Middle East's most technologically advanced military. But low and high-tech solutions should not be viewed as opposites in conflict, but as complementary. Israel will continue to be a country that relies very much on technology, but we have to understand that there are areas and places that you cannot rely only solely on technology. You have to go sometimes back to human beings and sometimes to technologies that are not always the cutting edge. The infantry soldier on the ground, present in war for millennia, can become a high-tech tool when equipped with the latest weapons, sensors and communications devices. Even a badly equipped insurgent can become part of the developing information war space when kitted out with a GoPro and an internet connection. Kyiv has repeatedly demonstrated the significance of this front in modern war. Ukraine and Gaza's battles have shown that often a low-tech solution can be the best counter to a high-tech innovation. So we have a pretty weird situation in which simple but smart and cheap solutions really change things on the battlefield. As can be seen in the use of trenches or cage armor to protect from the prying eyes and drop munitions of drones. Both wars have also shown that quantity has a quality all of its own and that high-tech doesn't need to mean expensive. Whether that means in terms of expendable munitions or massed infantry. Time for a short break. We'll be back with another update for you shortly. Stay tuned. This is I-24 News. Date of war families completely gunned down in their beds. We have no idea where is she. As our soldiers are fighting on the front line, but the general perception is something that certainly needs to to be fought as well. We'll be watching I-24 News coming to you from Tel Aviv on this day 84 of the war with Hamas. Sirens blared in both northern and southern Israel this Friday. The IDF says it carried out an extensive strike in southern Lebanon targeting launch positions and a Hezbollah military compound. Saudi media is reporting that an Israeli airstrike killed 11 members of Iran's revolutionary guards in Damascus. The article claims the attack has a greater impact than the U.S. assassination of the IRGC general Kassem Soleimani several years ago. And in Gaza the IDF expands its operations in the south destroying tunnels and seizing weapons including from the homes of terrorists who carried out the October 7th massacre in Kibbutz near Oz. Well for the very latest on the fighting in Gaza we can go now to southern Israel. Our senior correspondent Pierre Kloshendler is close to the border with Gaza. Pierre the IDF says it has been expanding its operations in the south of the strip. What's happening? Right now we just saw two missiles fired from a gunship an Apache gunship just over our head in the direction of southern Gaza city probably in the neighborhoods of Al Tufaq and Daraj which are the site of a ground offensive for the last stronghold of Hamas held by a battalion facing the 162 division of the IDF. Behind me is the direction of El Burej, El Muassi and Nusra the three refugee camps in central Gaza Strip. We know that there is heavy fighting on the northern and eastern outskirts of El Burej since Sunday when the 36th division of the IDF started confronting the battalion of El Burej. In each of the three refugee camps there is a battalion of Hamas which is still more or less intact according to the IDF further south in Hanyunas. There's been an addition of two division of two sorry brigades and right now there are seven brigades operating in and out of Hanyunas with the 98 division of elite commando units operating in the heart of Hanyunas and what they do is what they've been doing all the time since December 2nd when they started to invade Hanyunas they're neutralizing tunnel shafts trying to map out the network of tunnels where according to their estimate the political and military leadership of Hamas is hiding probably with hostages as well. The city is completely encircled in order to prevent from the terrorists the leadership and also the hostages to move south to the city of Rafar which has not been taken over by the IDF and it sits on the Israeli-Egyptian border and that's a critical point because there are smuggling tunnels and beneath the border between Gaza and Egypt and the fear of course would be that the leadership of Hamas as well as the hostages would be smuggled out of the Gaza Strip to the Sinai Peninsula and that would be even harder for the IDF to try and retrieve those hostages. Now in the outskirts of Hanyunas on the eastern outskirts on the border with Israel there is a community called Ahudaha and from that community the Al-Nurbah commando units of Hamas but portrayed probably the worst massacre apart from the Raif party in Kibbutz near Oz where half of the population of this community was either massacred or kidnapped and held hostage into the Gaza Strip so there is one whole brigade right now which is operating in Al-Hudaha with fierce clashes in order to dismantle the infrastructure of Hamas there. Laura? Pierre, thank you very much indeed. Pierre Clashendler there with the latest on the fighting in Gaza. Well with me in the studio this hour Amir Oran is a defense and government commentator. Good to see you Amir. Thank you for being with us. So we just heard the latest on the IDF operation inside Gaza. They're expanding their operations in the south with a focus on the border with Egypt. It is exacting a very high price in terms of civilian casualties and also 168 IDF troops have now fallen in the fighting. Regrettably that's very true. This is a sort of a war of attrition almost a quagmire for Israel because for the last four weeks today is Friday the 13th not the 13th day but tomorrow starts the 13th week of the war and results are yet to be seen. Now there are many small and minor and accumulative achievements but they do not add up to a big achievement which could justify the entire investment. What is such an achievement? Either the capture or killing of the very top of the Hamas leadership such as Yahya Sinwa or Mohamed Def and or the rescue of most of the hostages. So four weeks after the resumption of the operations following a one week ceasefire nothing of that type has been achieved and this is why there is now growing American pressure on Israel to transition from this phase to a less intensive one. Okay all right we'll come back to that in a moment but let's go first to the north of Israel where sirens have been blaring around the largely evacuated communities close to the border with Lebanon. Our Zach Anders is with us and joins us now so Zach the IDF has been striking his border positions inside Lebanon today. They have and in the last week it appears these strikes have reached further inside southern Lebanon in an attempt to weaken Hezbollah's resolve and tighten the or rather target the network of weapons and resources that they have throughout the south. These strikes in the last few months since October 7th had been limited fairly limited to the area very close around the border but in the last week week and a half we've seen these strikes from the air pick up considerably at a distance trying to strike several kilometers past that border and it appears that today has been no different with a handful of these strikes an unconfirmed amount we're still working to put together some of these details because the IDF has not been releasing the exacts or the specifics of where they've been hitting but relying on some of the media that's being posted inside Lebanon some of the reportage that's coming out of that country has shown considerable strikes that are again deep inside the country and numerous enough so that the chatter that's reaching throughout that media network has been them seeing a considerable escalation and the discussion has moved to the next phase for them as they see continued these continued strikes inflicting quite a heavy toll over now 130 confirmed Hezbollah deaths as they've self reported but as many as 170 across this conflict in southern Lebanon and inside southern Syria when you consider the other factions involved both Hamas, Palestinian Islamic jihad and other groups that are operating both in southern Lebanon and southern Syria nearly 180 have been killed and as a talk us through another unconfirmed a strike this is a Saudi report which claimed that Israel killed 11 senior members of the IRGC the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Damascus and it's coming after another strike in Damascus killed another senior IRGC leader several days before this strike appears to have come after the funeral service for this senior leader and the day after rather this happening inside Damascus the IDF has not confirmed their involvement in this strike but we have seen the IDF admit to being involved in airstrikes inside Damascus before in the last several weeks so this is not outside the scope of their control one of the questions being what is happening with Syrian air defenses and the Syrian air force that continue to allow non-state their non other state actors rather to strike deep inside the country and at the the center the network of power inside Syria it should be noted that inside Syria not only has the IRGC seen now fatalities but Syrian army soldiers have been killed as well so they're very much involved in this conflict as they host a numerous amount of different factions and political groups within that country that continue to target Israel Zach thank you very much indeed and just to update earlier today there was a car ramming attack in the west bank three Israelis were wounded and it's now emerged that five soldiers were also wounded in that attack one of them seriously the assailant was killed at the scene all right well Amir Oren is with me in the studio and so you're not particularly impressed with the military operation in Gaza so far how do you rate the IDF response to that other threat in the north so a word about Gaza what the Israeli defense forces and the intelligence community knew or believed they know beforehand was two-dimensional they could have pictured for instance the tunnels but when they reached them when they saw the real thing it turned out to be three-dimensional um it's wide it's deep it's long and if you had the fourth dimension time it's very complicated now up north Israel and Hezbollah have other measurements for each side's achievements we just had Zach count the number of Hezbollah casualties either the 120 or so or 170 this does not degrade the real power of Hezbollah it takes some of it and the airstrikes take some of their assets but the fact that Hezbollah is still preventing thousands upon thousands of Israeli residents of the northern communities from coming home and is systematically destroying their homes by these anti-tank missiles that means that Israel is not winning this fight either and just a quick word on Gaza I mean Israel says it's killed um upwards of 8 000 terrorists it's destroyed um tunnels it's seized weapons I mean did Israel have any other choice but go into Gaza no but this does not mean that you can measure success by these figures because if you are fighting an army let's say a division of 10 000 soldiers and you kill a wound or capture 3 000 of them the division is no longer operative but in a terrorist organization and there are 40 000 the war started out with 40 000 Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic jihad terrorists if you killed one quarter of them there are still 30 000 who are going to hide in the rubble not only in tunnels and keep pestering the occupying force well we have been warned haven't we that this is going to be a long drawn-out war but I want to talk about the politics politics is going back into frame the former prime minister Naftali Bennett has defended himself after he drew fire for revealing in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that he ordered strikes on Iran when he was in power back in 2022 officials say those statements were not cleared by the military censor widely seen as a criticism of Prime Minister Netanyahu Bennett said that recent governments had talked and sermonized about Iran but had not exacted a painful price well the current defense minister you have gallant has responded to those comments by Bennett take a listen I just wrapped up a visit to the Ramat David airbase I want to express total appreciation for the air force's performance for the fighters in the air and on the ground and for their cooperation the operations of the air force in all sectors is very impressive and it's fitting that the roar of the jets drown out the superfluous talk and allow IDF forces to carry out their mission quietly and securely I want to say to anyone who hears us we are engaged in intensified operations in the Gaza Strip and they will continue for an extended period until the objectives are achieved these operations are currently centered on Khan Yunus the achievements are precise impressive and the results are not far behind that's the defense minister you have gallant there so I mean all and I mean the polls show that under Netanyahu Likud would get around 15 seats in the 120 member Knesset are we seeing now politicians kind of popping their head up and jostling of course it's all politics let me supply you with a trivia detail the Ramat David Ramat David base which gallant visited is not named after King David or David Ben Gurion but rather David Lloyd George the British Prime Minister of World War one now what happened last year is ancient history what Bennett did in ordering the Mossad or the IDF to kill this Iranian operative or another one or to strike at a plant inside Iran is immaterial when Netanyahu was in office he revealed too many details about Israeli assassination attempts and successes and the heist of the archive from Tehran this was much more humiliating to the Iranians and there is no problem with what Bennett just said but yes the polls are showing that Bennett who left office quite dejected did not even try to run in the elections has a political resurrection of sorts at least in the polls what happens in the election will probably be many disappointed Likud voters deserting their party choosing Bennett as a right-wing candidate over whoever succeeded Netanyahu but again this could be a one-time affair all right Amir thank you very much Amir or in there well meanwhile over in Ukraine the government has reported the biggest Russian assault on its territory since the war began nearly two years ago at least 26 people were killed and 120 injured in multiple missile attacks which targeted Kib, Lviv, Dnipro, Odessa, Harkiv and elsewhere in the country as well NATO member Poland meanwhile says everything indicates a Russian missile briefly entered its airspace Friday morning we're here to talk about all of that Dr Hanna Schelles is the director of security programs at the foreign policy council Ukrainian prison thank you very much for being with us dr. Schelles so this is the largest attack by air since the Russian invasion began why is this happening now that being quite unexpected because for the last few months Russia been accumulating the long-range missiles so we were expecting that around the holidays when the winter is really coming Russia will try to damage the energy system the same as they did the last year however we had quite a warm December first then for the last months they've been testing with the Iranian drones the effectiveness of the air defense system plus the news about the F-16 delivery that should happen this or next week being constantly in news so for the Russian Federation that's been the very proper psychological moment first of all because they accumulated what is necessary the forces they tested the ground they included a lot of the psychological and information warfare at the same time and they attacked just early in the morning when everybody is having their holidays but that being quite a sophisticated attack and well prepared we definitely can see it from the trajectory of the missiles meanwhile Poland says that it was most probably a Russian air missile sorry that entered its airspace today that is NATO airspace that is European Union airspace this would be a significant escalation wouldn't it that is not the first time when the Russian either drones or missiles are crossing the territory of the NATO member state if we remember in the summer the Russian drones crossed the Romanian territory and even exploded there because the border is so close when you target the ports of Ismail for example that is just 200 meters through the river to the territory of Romania when you target the city of Lviv that is just 40 minutes drive by car to the Polish border and when you target some of the bases like closer to the border you have very very short distance and we need to understand that the Russian precise or so-called precise missiles very often are not so precise so there were incidents in the past where they crossed the territory for example the territory of Moldova several times the missiles been crossing when they tried to target Odessa or Vinnitsa regions however the question is what it was it deliberately or was it just the quality of the Russian missiles and that is the question that now probably the Polish intelligence is trying to respond a lot of comparisons have been made with the war in Ukraine and the war here and in terms of public opinion how do people view the war israel is currently waging against Hamas you know that's definitely since the 7 of october israel been constantly in the ukrainian news and that is the shared pain for the terrorist actions and just the war crimes happening on the ground so in this case you could see everything from the discussions to the media to the big boards that appeared with the Israeli flag in October this year but at the same time that's definitely discussions about will the events in Israel take attention first to all of the american congress from what is happening in ukraine will it means that ukraine should receive less support from our international partners i mean that's not the way of jealousy it's more of the pragmatic practical because ukraine is trying to understand how much we can rely on our partners how much we're dependent on our partners but in general if you ask about the general public that is just the moral support of the Israeli and the desire this war is over but also yet one probably moment that i need to emphasize a lot of people are discussing that for the international community we need to speak that the same actors are involved in both cases we know the iranian role um iranian weapons supply to russia and then to ukraine and iranian supplies to hamas the same is about the role of russia because we understand that their position regarding the current events is israel is also quite a dubious if to be soft and politically correct so that's more of the strategic level discussions are happening should ukraine and israel speak more publicly together about the same actors who are the real spoilers of these wars dr hannah shellis thank you very much indeed one more now on the similarities between the war in ukraine and israel's war with hamas robert swift has this report the israel gas offence was protected by some of the best border security technology in the world remote gun turrets underground sensors to detect tunneling and surveillance balloons the after barrier was built on the assumption that we have a very high technology seeking the vision the other thing that we will tell us when someone is approaching the fence this one collapsed hamas simply went through it with demolition charges and pickup trucks overwhelming the defences with force of numbers and a few drones believing that its high tech defences suffice israel let other more basic considerations fall by the wayside israel adopted in the last i think 20 years asymmetric balance between technology and the number of units manpower that it needs on the field it looks like israel thought in its in its calculation that the high technology will bring advantage to the battlefield instead of represent of manpower inside it since the october 7 attack a number of former israeli generals have argued for an expanded idf budget and footprint ukraine fighting on a very different battlefield also sees its manning levels as a problem unfortunately manpower is still super important because we get back to the scales of massive armies of million strong armies which is absolutely weird which is absolutely unnatural to the state of our modern society locked in a stalemate with a larger foe its chief of staff argues that advances in technologies like electronic warfare are needed to break the deadlock in the 21st century the development of science and as a result the advancement of armaments and military equipment inevitably led to the changes in the tactics of its use the enemy didn't stay behind either you see what is happening specifically in the last few days we have a powerful confrontation specifically in the technological aspect both of the wars defining 2023 show a blurring of low and high technologies on the battlefield in ukraine the first large example of state on state drone warfare the howitzer the shovel and the trench as seen on the fields of the first world war are as important as the quadcopter and in Gaza urban siege warfare reminiscent of stalingrad is being waged by the middle east's most technologically advanced military but low and high tech solutions should not be viewed as opposites in conflict but as complementary israel will continue to be a country that rely very much on technology but we have to understand that there are areas and places that you cannot rely only solely on technology you have to go sometimes back to human beings and sometimes two technologies that are not always the cutting edge the infantry soldier on the ground present in war for millennia can become a high-tech tool when equipped with the latest weapons sensors and communications devices even a badly equipped insurgent can become part of the developing information war space when kitted out with a gopro and an internet connection kiv has repeatedly demonstrated the significance of this front in modern war ukraine and gaza's battles have shown that often a low-tech solution can be the best counter to a high-tech innovation so we have a pretty weird situation in which simple but smart and cheap solutions really change things on the battlefield as can be seen in the use of trenches or cage armor to protect from the prying eyes and drop munitions of drones both wars have also shown that quantity has a quality all of its own and that high tech doesn't need to mean expensive whether that means in terms of expendable munitions or massed infantry time for short break we'll be back with another update we shortly stay tuned this is i24 news a state of war families completely done down in their beds we have no idea where is she as our soldiers are fighting on the front line but the general perception is something that certainly needs to to be fought as well and you're watching i24 news coming to you from televieve on this day 84 of the war we've come out sirens bled in both northern and southern israel this friday as the idf says it carried out an extensive strike in southern lebanon targeting hezbollah launch positions and the military compound audio media reports in israeli airstrike killed 11 members of iran's revolutionary guards in damascus the article claims the attack has a greater impact than the u.s. assassination of the irgc general kassem solemany several years ago and in garland the idf expands its operations in the south destroying tunnels and seizing weapons including from the homes of terrorists to carried out the october 7 massacre in kibbutz near oz those are the top stories this hour we will take you now to the north of israel where sirens have been blaring today around the largely evacuated communities close to the border with lebanon our zack anders is there for us now zack the idf has been striking hezbollah positions throughout the day and that has not seemed to deter hezbollah as they've taken responsibility claim credit for eight attacks throughout the day with multiple red alerts that have been happening throughout the afternoon apparent damage but no reported casualties in northern israel southern lebanon might be a different story as you're right these strikes have appeared to be quite intense and at range these are taking place much further beyond this border than we are accustomed to at least in the several weeks before the or as this war began but since december mid december we've seen considerable strikes taking place some 20 miles north of this border in areas where the idf and the iaf say they're striking hezbollah positions not just of their personnel on the ground but also of the infrastructure and some of the weapons storage facilities which we have not had the details the specifics described to us by the idf they've kept much of this under wraps but there has been reports that some of these rocket batteries where hezbollah is storing some of their long-range weapons these rockets that are capable of reaching even central israel that they've been striking some of these positions as well potentially signaling the urgency to eliminate some of this this threat here as the tension continues to escalate and zak hezbollah of course is an iranian proxy there are signs that israel is taking the fight to the head of the proxies notably a strike in demascus which has killed 11 senior members of the irgc this is a report in Saudi media and that's a considerable strike again inside syria with the taking place over syrian airspace one would have to surmise to be able to reach some of these targets in demascus the syrian air defenses that claim that they've been shooting down projectiles for several weeks but to no avail as some of these strikes continue to hit demascus this one the idf has not taken responsibility for or accepted any involvement in but they have in the past accepted involvement in strikes taking place in demascus so while the media reports that are coming out of the arab world pin idf responsibility will wait until there's official confirmation but it would not be outside the realm of possibilities of what is in the the possibilities or the the scope of control that the idf has demonstrated inside syria before zak thank you very much zak andris there in the north of israel with me in the studio this hour rafaelia rashami is a former senior intelligence officer in the idf and a security analyst thank you for being with us rafael israel of course made the confirmation or denies being behind that strike on demascus but that is something of a blow to the irgc isn't it yes it's not confirmed yet it's a saudi source that disclosed this high number of high ranking iranian officers you have to understand that there's also an american presence and then american interests were hit just today in syria by pro- iranian militias so it could also be the americans we won't say who it is or who it's not lately you have noticed that many people are very outspoken about what we do or don't do and i don't think it's a good idea yes and i think it's a good idea i think we used to be much more discreet you used to keep our silence so one thing is for sure we are noticing now that the idf is much more proactive in the north that it used to be at the beginning at the beginning the khizballah seemed to dictate the pace they were shooting at will anti-tank missiles or other projectiles or suicide drones and then the idf was just answering back reprisal more as dosed voting and escalation as asked by the biden administration right now in the last three or four days we noticed a completely different attitude proactive very intense very surgical the targets that are being hit are targets that were probably in the draws of the idea for quite a while a list of important assets of the khizballah syria has been hit because why are we going to be more intense and proactive because the iranians are putting a very very big effort into providing khizballah with advanced weaponry that they didn't have before gps for their missiles suicide drones we're noticing a lot a lot of convoys by air by sea by trucks on the ground towards the south of syria towards the south of lebanon from iran with sophisticated equipment that we really cannot allow to reach in the hands of the terrorists you alluded to what former prime minister naftali benet said and leaving aside whether or not he was right to come out and say it that he ordered strikes on iran in 2022 when he was in power do you agree with the essence of what he's saying in that israel should not talk about iran so much israel should actually be taking the fight to iran yes i don't know if it's now the time to take the fight to iran i also really don't see why a country of less than 10 million people is in charge of the whole middle east i mean what are the americans doing there is a huge fleet in the mediterranean what is the international community doing the threat of iran is not an israeli problem it's a global problem so whether israel should or not attack iran it's something that is for a later date and i think it's quite for now we should not be afraid to escalate and it seems that we're not to escalate to have a bigger fight going against the hisbala and if the irans want to join well they're welcome i think i hope that at this point even though it's an election year in the united states and even though the americans are not interested in the conflict they cannot let one little country take care of the whole middle east i mean we're defending the the free world the axis is from moscow to beijing with terran in the middle you have to cut this axis of evil in the middle in in iran in terran to separate the russians from the chinese this is a huge strategic problem can't be dealt with just by well i guess the biden administration would would highlight the military aid that it supplied not only to israel but also to ukraine in the fight against that axis yes and we're very grateful but it's not enough it's suffering and the first of all the aid is not enough they should double the aid in the weaponry because we have spent a lot of ammunition and it is a problem because the hisbala is looking at that the hisbala is quite satisfied by seeing that we are using a lot of ammunition against the khamas so it's less ammunition for to be spent of course against them and i'm afraid to say that at some point the americans cannot just sit and look at what's going on they have to join the fight they have to fight one example that is really grotesque is the red sea where the hooties are actually blocking the world economy and doing what they want in the red sea with a massive american presence with a naval coalition of 20 countries but the ships are only patrolling they're not doing anything they are in a defensive mode and that's why most main companies maritime companies have decided still to go around africa not to go into the red sea because they do not feel protected they don't they don't feel safe and that's what they're also going to ask the israeli to take care of the hooties of yemen i mean what are we talking about well it is do you think that the problem is that israel and the united states has lost its deterrence in the middle east we have lost our deterrence a while ago as to our immediate enemies hisbala khamas i think we're regaining a bit of that deterrence right now i think we have also a good clamp down on the west bank so i think we're making progress but the americans should learn the lesson from the past when when they retreat from the middle east when they don't want to have boots on the ground they want to spare which you have to understand of course the lives of their soldiers this doesn't this is not good this is not good for them this is not good for europe either because this as soon as there is a vacuum as soon as they retreat immediately the russians come in like they did in syria immediately the chinese come in with financing terrorist groups the katar this is not right the the guard is down and it is very dangerous all right well we'll have an american military speaker on the program later so we'll put some of those questions to him but for now i think thank you very much well the idf has revealed that it recently destroyed an apartment in the north of gaza which belonged to the synoir which he used as a hideout inside the apartment the idf found a strategic tunnel shaft on the basement floor which led to a much larger tunnel it's believed that this was used by senior hamas leadership well let's go to the south of israel now our senior correspondent pia kloshenlo is at the border with gaza and pia how significant is this latest idf update about that synoir hideout or full hideout i should say i don't know how significant it is i think it's very significant to the fact that it takes a long long time for the idf to discover to uncover the tunnel network that was in the northern part of the gaza strip the ground offensive started in october 7 and even if there is a certain delay in the publication of what the idf found in gaza city this hideout and a 20 meter deep tunnel with with a tunnel which is 218 meter long which is not that long with a sewage system ventilation prayer rooms resting rooms etc etc that shows that it's a very hard just work that the idf has to grapple with and not only in the northern sector of the gaza strip the idf when it started in vei invading hanyu nests in the southern sector of the gaza strip on december 2nd they were amazed to find the quantity of tunnel shafts that they that they were confronting thousands and that shows that the extent of the tunnel network in which according to the idf yes in war and his uh and his military and the military leadership are hiding and probably with hostages is very very very large and that will take also a long long time to dismantle to neutralize and the problem is that this also tunnels in raffa raffa has not yet been taken over by the idf the ground forces are not operating in raffa it sits on the egyptian gaza border it's a very sensitive location because egypt is deeply involved into the negotiations between hamas and israel mediating a potential release of more hostages it's so sensitive that in order to convince the egyptian of the of the necessity to neutralize the smuggling tunnels which are running underneath the the the the side of the egyptian side of raffa to the gaza side of raffa because these tunnels can also smuggle people out of the gaza strip including hostages and the leadership in order to do that you need to give egypt some sort of horizon political horizon for the future of the gaza strip for the day after and up until now israel's prime minister have simply refused to do so and that also is probably an obstacle regarding the future of raffa and its tunnels pia thank you very much pia kloschendler there in the south of israel with the latest on the fighting in gaza raffa elia rashami 168 israeli troops have now fallen in the fighting in gaza every day more tunnels you know weapons seized etc still waiting for that big turning point though aren't we so we're in a month from now approximately we will be in control of the gaza strip in a way that we do not need to continue this kind of very intense attack we will be able to send a lot of reservists back home and retreat a little from many hot spots or from in gaza and just sit around and only go with incursions or bomb from the air when need be we will not have to be all the time there there is a lot of progress being made the main problem is that we want to liberate the hostages and it also we want to spare the hostages because wouldn't the ramas have hostages it would be very important to close just the raffa crossing from under the tunnels under because we could just bury them alive i mean we we don't need to go and run after the kamas in the tunnels if there were no hostages we would just sit outside and whoever comes out of somewhere we just eliminate them like a rabbit if if they managed to escape towards sanai under the raffa under the philadelphia road it's it's not such a tragedy so they escape so we will we'll uh if we're taking about the leaders we'll we'll reach them later on in a few weeks from now somebody from the mosad will take them down if they escape so let them escape and let them finish this this wall so it's not so important to to be in a hurry to block the tunnels there i think that we are going to be soon seeing a different like i said in the months or so a completely different warfare kind of warfare with in my opinion less casualties for the adf which is very very regretful but really if you consider it's three months of guerrilla warfare in a very intricate theater of operation you have a by military rule to multiply by six the power of the guerrilla people so that we are fighting so the number is actually low as compared to similar situations in the different different conflicts all right raffaella you're telling me for now thank you hamas has too much to lose from a war with israel and therefore will not take the risk that was the disastrous misconception which guided israeli leaders in recent years our senior defense correspondent jonathan reggaev looks back at the multiple government security and military failures which allowed hamas to inflict such a terrible wound and drag israel into war on paper it looked like a very good plan beneficial to everyone involved hamas would get much needed money for its civil employees who do not get their salaries this money is going to pay my debts i have to pay my delayed rents electricity water bill katar would get the international status as the provider of gaza and a reliable global player katar's credible state country okay and we will we tell them but what is there on the ground okay what we are doing there it's a good work in israel which mostly kept quiet on the issue did everything to facilitate it believing an improved economic situation in gaza would serve as a calming factor it began roughly five years ago as gaza was sinking into a major economic crisis katar offered assistance to the gaza residents monthly cash envelopes with anything between 15 and 40 million dollars were brought by the katari envoy to the banks in gaza and from there on paper to pay the salaries of gaza's civil workers who were desperately waiting for it one day feels like a year to us we have kids that we would like to raise to give them a good life where are we supposed to get the money for that at the same time katar was also providing fuel for the gaza power plants to keep working for longer hours and cement for construction of buildings destroyed in previous wars with israel katar became the closest ally of hamas the emir was given a hero's welcome when he came for a visit and at least according to his envoy peaceful days were about to come the work which we are doing it's keeping peace for the the both nation okay both people there was just one issue someone had to monitor where exactly the aid was going and whether the claims made by hamas were actually true they know the money that was spent went only for humanitarian projects not one penny was used for weapons or other things the salaries are used for health education welfare and other humanitarian cases the money will go only to beneficiaries now we know who these beneficiaries really were uhama zinwar for example brother of hamas leader here we seem right next to the driver in what is the biggest tunnel uncovered so far in gaza a huge tunnel which cost millions and millions of dollars while the gaza people are starving the subterranean tunnel constructed by muhammad zinwar this is the zinwar project tunnel that was meant to do a terror attack hamas has spent a million of dollars in this project specifically here is another beneficiary five million shekels roughly one point five million dollars were found in suitcases in the home of a senior hamas official in the neighborhood of jubalia along with ammunition and rocket launchers terror tunnels and ammunition this is what the money was used for but those in charge did not see it we wanted to avoid a humanitarian disaster that's why the money started flowing for those purposes to avoid disease and maintain the two million people there the plan that looked so good for five years crushed down on october 7th instead of avoiding a humanitarian disaster it brought one first on the israeli side of the border and then in gaza so many questions will have to be asked once the war is over the issue of the humanitarian money funding this terror monster is one of the most important well the u.s navy says it's ready to strike iranian backed forces in yemen if ordered to do so yemen's iranian backed hoosies have been attacking and harassing commercial shipping in the red sea prompting the u.s to create a multinational force to protect it and danmark is the latest country to join that force we're joining me now colonel rich ousen is a senior fellow at the atlantic council and a geopolitical consultant at dragaman llc thank you very much for being with us uh colonel ousen and so is this a sign that the biden administration is prepared to be more proactive when it comes to tackling uh the iranian backed hoosies in yemen it's good to be with you i think this is sort of a slouching towards a solution situation where we see of course the overriding principle for the biden administration is to avoid escalation with iran unfortunately when that is the guiding principle rather than effective deterrence what happens is that the iranians and the their proxy control the escalation ladder so the it's good that we're positioning ships it's good that additional authorities have been given we've seen strikes against ground-based militias elsewhere in iraq for instance that have been attacking uh american bases there but these attacks on international shipping haven't really been deterred and i think we're loosening the case on the revolver so to speak and moving towards effective action but we're not quite there yet does this all go back to political considerations because of course we are in an election year in the united states is there just no appetite to to get more involved well part of its uh domestic political considerations that's always true but i think there's a strategic calculation here as well i think uh not unrelated perhaps to domestic politics but still in terms of the strategy the biden administration has for de-escalating the conflict which is what they want to see the last thing the white house wants to see right now is a new round of fighting uh in and around yemen that might lead to for instance uh retaliation stronger retaliation by his law against israel as well trying to tamp down that violence so that we can approach humanitarian assistance and stabilization for gaza is part of the strategic calculation for biden yes it's good politics but i think it's also part of how they see the conflict well uh denmark is the latest country to announce that it's joining the uh us led task force but bar rain is the only arab gulf country that is joining um is there some disappointment that there hasn't been more countries signing up for this i think so what i've heard behind the scenes is that there are more countries that are supportive in the gulf and other a muslim majority countries that are supportive of the effort because they suffer economically when the global commons are not secure as well but now is a time where the houthis sort of have the rhetorical high ground on this because they say they are supporting gaza and opposing israel they claim they're not attacking international shipping just shipping that is related to israel so there's sort of a public relations dilemma for gulf states and other muslim majority states that really are not in favor of this piracy is what it comes down to but don't want to be seen as opposing the person who's opposing what they see as aggression against the palestinian people so behind the scenes there is more support tacitly and i i don't think the us and the rest of coalition is really disappointed but this is sort of to be expected from countries that are on the front line we've talked a lot about what a great ally the united states has been to israel and support has been steadfast since october 7th but um can we flip it a little bit is america long term relying too much on israel to take care of these multiple threats in the middle east and and that it should at some stage tackle iran well i think that's right and uh of course iran has a sort of a cosmology a political cosmology if you will of great satan and little satan so we should take that seriously instead of letting um our ally in the region who they have targeted as the little satan as long as there is a country that with nuclear ambitions and with regional proxy networks that considers us to be the great satan in other words explicitly targets the united states as their primary enemy i think we need to take that more seriously and certainly in iraq in syria in the red sea there are places where we are seeing aggression against us interests and against us personnel we should push back on that more and not just leave it to the israelis to fight one end of this network all right kernel rich arts and thank you very much indeed uh rafael you're showing me i've got a minute left do you want to respond very quickly to what you just heard well i see that we are both in agreement which is a good sign but we're the military we're not the politicians uh we should be listened to more by the political level um every day that passes by the iranian problem gets more and more dangerous every day that passes by his pala is emboldening itself the hooties are getting stronger uh this is a no-brainer what happened on the 7th of october was a day after a day after a day until it came to the catastrophe and this is what is happening now in the middle east the iranians it's not a day after a day it's been for years uh with the absolute passivity from the international community is getting very very dangerous all right rafael you're showing me thank you very much indeed we're going to take a short break we'll have another update before you shortly stay with us this is i24 news broadcasting from israel with dozens of correspondence throughout the world brings the truth from israel to hundreds of millions of people in scores of countries completely sundown in their best bring israel's story to the world i24 news channels now on hot so we're seeing the first generation of solar panels now being recycled what's exciting is we're at the forefront what is about to happen is a tsunami of solar panels coming back into the supply chain you're watching i24 news coming to you from telefeeve on this day 84 of the war with hamas siren's bled in both northern and southern israel this friday as the idf says it carried out an extensive strike in southern lebanon targeting hezbollah launch positions and the military compound saudi media reports an israeli airstrike killed 11 members of iran's revolutionary guards in damascus the article claims the attack has a greater impact than the us assassination of the irgc general khasem solemany several years ago and in gaza the idf expands its operations in the south destroying tunnels and seizing weapons including from the homes of terrorists who carried out the october 7 massacre in kibbutz near oz those are the top stories this hour we will take you now to the north of israel where sirens have been blaring today around the largely evacuated communities close to the border with lebanon our zack anders is there for us now zack the idf has been striking hezbollah positions throughout the day and that has not seemed to deter hezbollah as they've taken responsibility claim credit for eight attacks throughout the day with multiple red alerts that have been happening throughout the afternoon apparent damage but no reported casualties in northern israel southern lebanon might be a different story as you're right these strikes have appeared to be quite intense and at range these are taking place much further beyond this border than we are accustomed to at least in the several weeks before or as this war began but since december mid december we've seen considerable strikes taking place some 20 miles north of this border in areas where the idf and the iaf say they're striking hezbollah positions not just of their personnel on the ground but also of the infrastructure and some of the weapons storage facilities which we have not had the details the specifics described to us by the idf they've kept much of this under wraps but there has been reports that some of these rocket batteries where hezbollah is storing some of their long-range weapons these rockets that are capable of reaching even central israel that they've been striking some of these positions as well potentially signaling the urgency to eliminate some of this this threat here as the tension continues to escalate and zach hezbollah of course is an iranian proxy there are signs that israel is taking the fight to the head of the proxies notably a strike in damascus which has killed 11 senior members of the irgc this is a report in Saudi media that's a considerable strike again inside syria with the taking place over syrian airspace one would have to surmise to be able to reach some of these targets in damascus the syrian air defenses claim that they've been shooting down projectiles for several weeks but to no avail as some of these strikes continue to hit damascus this one the idf has not taken responsibility for or accepted any involvement in but they have in the past accepted involvement in strikes taking place in damascus so while the media reports that are coming out of the arab world pin idf responsibility will wait until there's official confirmation but it would not be outside the realm of possibilities of what is in the the possibilities or the the scope of control that the idf has demonstrated inside syria before zach thank you very much Zach Andrews there in the north of israel with me in the studio this hour rafaelia rashami is a former senior intelligence officer officer in the idf and a security analyst thank you for being with us rafael um israel of course made the confirmation or denies being behind that strike on damascus but that is something of a blow to the irgc isn't it yes it's not confirmed yet it's a saudi source that disclosed this high number of high ranking iranian officers you have to understand that there's also an american presence and an american interest was were hit just today in syria by pro- iranian militias so it could also be the americans we won't say who it is or who it's not lately you have noticed that many people are very outspoken uh about what we do or don't do and i don't think it's a good idea perhaps yes and i think it's a good idea i think we used to be much more discreet uh you used to keep our silence uh so one thing is for sure we are noticing now that the idf is much more proactive uh in the north that it used to be at the beginning at the beginning the khizballah seemed to dictate the pace they were shooting at will anti-tank missiles or other projectiles or suicide drones and then the idea was just answering back reprisal more as dosed avoiding an escalation as asked by the biden administration right now in the last three or four days we noticed a completely different attitude proactive very intense very surgical the targets that are being hit are targets that were probably in the drawers of the idea for quite a while a list of important assets of the khizballah syria has been hit because why are we going to be more intense and proactive because the iranians are putting a very very big effort into providing khizballah with advanced weaponry that they didn't have before gps for their missiles suicide drones we're noticing a lot a lot of convoys by air by sea by trucks on the ground towards the south of syria towards the south of lebanon from iran with sophisticated equipment that we really cannot allow to reach in the hands of the terrorists you alluded to a former prime minister naftali benet said um leaving aside whether or not he was right to come out and say it that he ordered strikes um on iran in 2022 when he was in power do you agree with the essence of what he's saying in that israel should not talk about iran so much israel should actually be taking the fight to iran yes i don't know if it's now the time to take the fight to iran i also really don't see why a country of less than 10 million people is in charge of the whole middle east i mean what are the americans doing there is a huge fleet in the mediterranean what is the international community doing the threat of iran is not an israeli problem it's a global problem so whether israel should or not attack iran it's something that is for a later date and i think it's quite for now we should not be afraid to escalate and it seems that we're not to escalate to have a bigger fight going against the and if the iranians want to join well they're welcome i think i hope that at this point even though it's an election year in the united states and even though the americans are not interested in conflict they cannot let one little country take care of the whole middle east i mean we're defending the the free world the axis is from Moscow to beijing we stare on in the middle you have to cut this axis of evil in the middle in iran in tehran to separate the russians from the chinese this is a huge strategic problem can't be dealt with just by us well i i guess the bind administration would highlight the military aid that it supplied not only to israel but also to ukraine in the fight against that axis yes i'm very grateful but it's not enough it's suffering and the first of all the aid is not enough they should double the aid in weaponry because we have spent a lot of ammunition and it is also a problem because the he's bala is looking at that the he's bala is quite satisfied by seeing that we're using a lot of ammunition against the hamas so it's less ammunition for to be spent of course against them and i'm afraid to say that at some point the americans cannot just sit and look at what's going on they have to join the fight they have to fight one example that is really grotesque is the red sea where the hooties are actually blocking the world economy and doing what they want in the red sea with a massive american presence with a naval coalition of 20 countries but the ships are only patrolling they're not doing anything they're on a defensive mode and that's why most main companies maritime companies have decided still to go around africa not to go into the red sea because they do not feel protected they don't they don't feel safe and that's what they're also going to ask the israeli to take care of the hooties of yemen i mean what are we talking about well it's it's do you think that the problem is that israel and the united states has lost its deterrence in the middle east we have lost our deterrence a while ago as to our immediate enemies i think we're regaining a bit of that deterrence right now i think we have also a good climb down on the west bank so i think we're making progress but the americans should learn the lesson from the past when when they retreat from the middle east when they don't want to have boots on the ground they want to spare which i can understand of course the lives of their soldiers this doesn't this is not good this is not good for them this is not good for europe either because this as soon as there is a vacuum as soon as they retreat immediately the russians come in like they did in syria immediately the chinese come in with financing terrorist groups the katar this is not right the the the the god is down and it is very dangerous all right well well we'll have an american military speaker on the program later so we'll put some of those questions to him but for now if i thank you very much well the idf has revealed that it recently destroyed an apartment in the north of gaza which belonged to the hamas liria sinwar which he used as a hideout inside the apartment the idf found a strategic tunnel shaft on the basement floor which led to a much larger tunnel it's believed that this was used by senior hamas leadership well let's go to the south of israel now our senior correspondent pia klashendler is at the border with gaza and pia how significant is this latest idf update about that sinwar hideout or full hideout i should say i don't know how significant it is i think it's very significant to the fact that it takes a long long time for the idf to discover to uncover uh the tunnel network that was in the northern part of the gaza strip the ground offensive started in october seven and even if there is a certain delay in the publication of what the idf found in gaza city this hideout and a 20 meter deep tunnel with with a tunnel which is 218 meter long which is not that long with a sewage system ventilation prayer rooms resting rooms etc etc that shows that it's a very hard just work that the idf has to grapple with and not only in the northern sector of the gaza strip the idf when he started in vei invading han yuness in the southern sector of the gaza strip on december 2nd they were amazed to find the quantity of tunnel shafts that they that they were confronting thousands and that shows that the extent of the tunnel network in which according to the idf yes in war and his uh and his milit and the military leadership are hiding and probably with hostages is very very very large and that will take also a long long time to dismantle to neutralize and the problem is that this also uh tunnels in rafa rafa has not yet been taken over by the idf the ground forces are not operating in rafa it sits on the egyptian gaza border it's a very sensitive location because egypt is deeply involved into the negotiations between hamas and israel mediating a potential release of more hostages it's so sensitive that in order to convince the egyptian of the of the necessity to neutralize the smuggling tunnels which are running underneath the side of the egyptian side of rafa to the gaza side of rafa because these tunnels can also smuggle people out of the gaza strip including hostages and the leadership in order to do that you need to give egypt some sort of horizon political horizon for the future of the gaza strip for the day after and up until now israel's prime minister has simply refused to do so and that also is probably an obstacle regarding the future of rafa and its tunnels piaz thank you very much piaz kashendla there in the south of israel with the latest on the fighting in gaza rafa elia rashami 168 israeli troops have now fallen in the fighting in gaza every day more tunnels you know weapons seized etc still waiting for that big turning point though aren't we so we're in a month from now approximately we will be in control of the gaza strip in a way that we do not need to continue this kind of very intense attack we will be able to send a lot of reservists back home and retreat a little from many hot spots or from in gaza and just sit around and only go with incursions or bomb from the air when need be we will not have to be all the time there there is a lot of progress being made the main problem is that we want to liberate the hostages and it also we want to spare the hostages because wound and the ramas have hostages it would be very important to close just the rafa crossing from under the tunnels under because we could just bury them alive i mean we we don't need to go and run after the kamas in the tunnels if there were no hostages we would just sit outside and whoever comes out there so somewhere we just eliminate them like a rabbit if if they managed to escape towards sanai under the rafa under the philadelphia road it's it's not such a tragedy so they escape so we will if we're talking about the leaders will will reach them later on in a few weeks from now somebody from the mosad will take them down if they escape so let them escape and let them finish this this wall so it's not so important to to be in a hurry to block the tunnels there i think that we are going to be soon seeing a different like i said in the months also a completely different warfare kind of warfare with in my opinion less casualties for the adf which is very very regretful but really if you consider it's three months of guerrilla warfare in a very intricate theater of operation you have a by military rule to multiply by six the power of the guerrilla people so that we're fighting so the number is actually low as compared to similar situations in the different conflicts all right raffaella euro shall me for now thank you how else has too much to lose from a war with israel and therefore will not take the risk that was the disastrous misconception which guided israeli leaders in recent years our senior defense correspondent jonathan reggaev looks back at the multiple government security and military failures which allowed hamas to inflict such a terrible wound and drag israel into war on paper it looked like a very good plan beneficial to everyone involved hamas would get much needed money for its civil employees who do not get their salaries this money is going to pay my debts i have to pay my delayed rents electricity water bill katara would get the international status as the provider of gaza and a reliable global player katara's credible state country okay and uh we uh when we tell them but what is there on the ground okay what we are doing there it's a good work in israel which mostly kept quiet on the issue did everything to facilitate it believing an improved economic situation in gaza would serve as a calming factor it began roughly five years ago as gaza was sinking into a major economic crisis katara offered assistance to the gaza residents monthly cash envelopes with anything between 15 and 40 million dollars were brought by the katari envoy to the banks in gaza and from there on paper to pay the salaries of gaza's civil workers who were desperately waiting for it one day feels like a year to us we have kids that we would like to raise to give them a good life where are we supposed to get the money for that at the same time katara was also providing fuel for the gaza power plants to keep working for longer hours and cement for construction of buildings destroyed in previous wars with israel katara became the closest ally of chamas the emir was given a hero's welcome when he came for a visit and at least according to his envoy peaceful days were about to come the work which we are doing it's keeping peace for the the both nation okay both people there was just one issue someone had to monitor where exactly the aid was going and whether the claims made by chamas were actually true they know the money that was spent went only for humanitarian projects not one penny was used for weapons or other things the salaries are used for health education welfare and other humanitarian cases the money will go only to beneficiaries now we know who these beneficiaries really were muhammad sinwar for example brother of chamas leader ihya sinwar here we see him right next to the driver in what is the biggest tunnel uncovered so far in gaza a huge tunnel which cost millions and millions of dollars while the gaza people are starving the subterranean tunnel constructed by muhammad sinwar this is the sinwar project tunnel that was meant to do a terror attack has spent a million of dollars in this project specifically here is another beneficiary five million shekels roughly one point five million dollars were found in suitcases in the home of a senior chamas official in the neighborhood of jubalia along with ammunition and rocket launchers terror tunnels and ammunition this is what the money was used for but those in charge did not see it we wanted to avoid a humanitarian disaster that's why the money started flowing for those purposes to avoid disease and maintain the two million people there the plan that looked so good for five years crushed down on october 7 instead of avoiding a humanitarian disaster it brought one first on the israeli side of the border and then in gaza so many questions will have to be asked once the war is over the issue of the humanitarian money funding this terror monster is one of the most important well the u.s navy says it's ready to strike iranian-backed forces in yemen if ordered to do so yemen's iranian-backed hoosies have been attacking and harassing commercial shipping in the red sea prompting the u.s to create a multinational force to protect it and danmark is the latest country to join that force we're joining me now colonel rich oudson is a senior fellow at the atlantic council and a geopolitical consultant at dragerman llc thank you very much for being with us kennel oudson and so is this a sign that the biden administration is prepared to be more proactive when it comes to tackling uh the iranian-backed hoosies in yemen it's good to be with you i think this is sort of a slouching towards a solution situation where we see of course the overriding principle for the biden administration is to avoid escalation with iran unfortunately when that is the guiding principle rather than effective deterrence what happens is that the iranians and the hoosies at their proxy control the escalation ladder so the it's good that we're positioning ships it's good that additional authorities have been given we've seen strikes against ground-based militias elsewhere in iraq for instance that have been attacking american bases there but these attacks on international shipping haven't really been deterred and i think we're loosening the case on the revolver so to speak and moving towards effective action but we're not quite there yet does this all go back to political considerations because of course we are in an election year in the united states is there just no appetite to to get more involved well part of its domestic political considerations that's always true but i think there's a strategic calculation here as well i think uh not unrelated perhaps to domestic politics but still in terms of the strategy the biden administration has for de-escalating the conflict which is what they want to see the last thing the white house wants to see right now is a new round of fighting uh in and around yemen that might lead to for instance uh retaliation stronger retaliation by his will against israel as well trying to tamp down that violence so that we can approach humanitarian assistance and stabilization for gaza as part of the strategic calculation for biden yes it's good politics but i think it's also part of how they see the conflict well uh denmark is the latest country to announce that it's joining the u.s led task force but bar rain is the only uh arab gulf country that is joining um is there some disappointment that there hasn't been uh more countries signing up for this i think so what i've heard uh behind the scenes is that there are more countries that are supportive in the gulf and other a muslim majority countries that are supportive of the effort because they suffer economically when the global commons are not secure as well but now is a time where the houthis sort of have the rhetorical high ground on this because they say they are supporting gaza and opposing israel they claim they're not attacking international shipping just shipping that is related to israel so there's sort of a public relations dilemma for gulf states and other muslim majority states that really are not in favor of this piracy is what it comes down to but don't want to be seen as opposing the person who's opposing what they see as aggression against the palestinian people so behind the scenes there is more support tacitly and i i don't think the u.s and the rest of coalition is really disappointed but this is sort of to be expected from countries that are on the front line we've talked a lot about what a great ally the united states has been to israel and support has been steadfast since october 7 but um can we flip it a little bit is america long term relying too much on israel to take care of these multiple threats in the middle east and and that it should at some stage tackle iran well i think that's right and of course iran has a sort of a cosmology a political cosmology if you will of great satan and little satan so we should take that seriously instead of letting our ally in the region who they have targeted as the little satan as long as there is a country that with nuclear ambitions and with regional proxy networks that considers us to be the great satan in other words explicitly targets the united states as their primary enemy i think we need to take that more seriously and certainly in iraq in syria in the red sea there are places where we are seeing aggression against us interests and against us personnel we should push back on that more and not just leave it to the israelis to fight one end of this network all right colonel richarton thank you very much indeed uh rafael you're telling me i've got a minute left you want to respond very quickly to what you just heard well i see that we are both in agreement which is a good sign but we are the military we're not the politicians uh we should be listened to more by the political level um every day that passes by the iranian problem gets more and more dangerous every day that passes by his pala is emboldening itself the hooties are getting stronger this is a no-brainer what happened on the 7th of october was a day after a day after a day until it came to the catastrophe and this is what is happening now in the middle east the iranians it's not a day after a day it's been for years uh with the absolute passivity from the international community is getting very very dangerous all right rafael you're showing me thank you very much indeed we're going to take a short break we'll have another update for you shortly stay with us this is i24 news made for me a unique concept in israel custom made men's fashion to your measurements made for me designer of all your events schedule your appointment at www.madeforme.co.il made for me official dresser of i24 news good evening ladies and gentlemen is in a state of war families completely done down in their beds we have no idea where is she as our soldiers are fighting on the front lines but the general perception is something that certainly needs to to be fought as well uniquely in i24 news and welcome you're watching i24 news coming to you from televieve the idf says it carried out an extensive strike in southern lebanon today targeting launch positions and a hizballot military compound and in gaza the idf says it is expanding its operations in the south and has revealed the discovery of an apartment that was used as a hideout by the hamas leader yaya simoir well with me in the studio this hour martin himel is a political analyst and international security analyst thank you very much for being with us martin so the idf has revealed this apartment with an extensive extensive tunnel network connected to the basement assigned that yaya simoir managed to escape capture once again well i i don't think it's like he's on the run and the army is right out on his heels and he's just running from place to place i think it's probably a little more sophisticated than that we don't know exactly what it is we don't know if he's got hostages with him we don't even know if he's in gaza let's face it we don't know where he is maybe the army does but we don't know and but the bottom line is he's somewhere and he's still operating and as long as his command and control is operating then hamas is operating in some way and of course he is we don't know where he is we don't know where the 129 hostages are either which is a priority for the idf isn't it yes it is i i sure hope they know a lot more than what we know that would be very good but it is a priority and not only is it a priority though it's it's sort of like conflicting with the other goal which is step up the war and try to push hamas or weaken hamas further and further because you can't fight the war in the same time free the hostages so easily and hamas has made it perfectly clear that it won't release hostages till there's some sort of ceasefire some sort of permanent arrangement and of course there is a lot of international pressure on this rail as as the war continues the united states has managed to veto any resolution which we call for an immediate ceasefire we did have a resolution last week but the un security council is holding another meeting on guards tonight what is the purpose of that i think it's just more of the same it's to try to generate international pressure to stop the fighting in order to basically preserve a hamas's existence and keep israel from finishing off the job that it wants to finish it's under the excuse or the umbrella about gaza civilians well of course they're suffering terribly and they are suffering a great deal but there's a lot more politics behind that involved in an attempt for to try to preserve hamas somewhere and in terms of politics looking a bit closer to home there is a reluctance on the part of the government to talk about what gaza might look like once hamas is hopefully destroyed well this is the most troubling thing i mean the young men and women are dying in gaza fighting uh giving their lives sacrificing so much and this government seems to be chained by politics uh you can't fight a war without an end game you can't fight a war without a strategic goal and looking what is going to what gaza is going to look like after this is all over and it doesn't seem like this government can even get to square one because of politics politics is superseding uh the imperative of trying to reach some sort of understanding what to do there and when we look at the polls um prime minister net and yahoo has uh sunk um catastrophically surprising in the polls uh he's polling at around 15 seats if a vote was held today right um we are seeing others kind of popping up aren't we uh perhaps smelling an opportunity here we've had the former prime minister naftali Bennett gave an interview to the wall street journal um you have gallant responding to that i mean just when where do you think we are with the politics is it inevitable that we will have to have an election at some stage it's not inevitable uh for at least three years it depends on five liqudniks or liqud party people or coalish people saying i'm not staying in the government that proves to be a very difficult bar to overcome uh unless there's some massive protests of some sort which is going to pressure this government out of its office but it will take incredible pressure if that's ever going to happen but yes people are smelling politics and naftali v gave a uh an interview showing that he's a tough guy he can stage two operations in iran despite not going through the censor saying that that's why gallant got angry but also because gallant's firing back politics as well that's what's most troubling about all this is all this politics is coming out at a time when people when soldiers are dying in in the war and uh he did hope that is was leaders would rise above politics right now and really care for what's best for the country quite i mean 168 troops have now fallen in the fighting in gaza a very difficult pill for israelis to swallow and we're yet to have that big moment aren't we in this war nearly 13 weeks on i don't know if there will be a big moment uh that doesn't mean they won't significantly erode hamas they they're going to put a must into a corner in rough raffa along the border with egypt it's far from certain that is was going to go into raffa because there's a million and a half palestinian refugees right now in that area uh so uh it could be that they'll transform to a more mobile uh in and out type of warfare that's going to involve lot less troops without some major statement because after all sin war has been caught to and even if he is caught they'll be a replacement uh the question is the true effect is what kind of alternative arrangement for gaza and running gaza that's the key thing that was best way to get to replace him us but that can't be done without the government deciding what it wants all right martin hamill for now thank you very much let's head to the south of israel our senior correspondent pierre clausian is standing by and pierre we've just been talking about the significant challenges to the idf as it seeks to strike a decisive blow against hamas we're coming up to 13 weeks of war a very heavy toll um for the israelis 168 troops have fallen and we learned that hamas leaders sin war evaded capture yet again well the idf believes that the yehia sin war is hiding in the underground tunnels of uh hanyunas and this is why you have now uh operating in and around hanyunas something like seven brigades plus a division of a commando unit which is operating in the heart of hanyunas all that in order to try and identify all the tunnel shafts and start scoring the tunnel network that is underneath the the this city now the problem is hamas as a whole brigade in hanyunas so there's a lot of fighting and at the same time it's a very long it's a long and hard just process to dismantle tunnels that nobody in the world including in the idf has a real solution a fast solution to the dismantlement of tunnels israel uses as far as we know some technology robots sniffing dogs and other technologies that we don't know but it takes a long time today the idf released for publication the fact that they uncovered uh headquarter uh underground headquarter for the political leadership of hamas for yehia sin war in the in gaza city gaza city which has been under israeli control except for one neighborhood al daraj to far where there is fighting but uh the rest of the cities under control and now even if there was some delay in announcing the discovery of that tunnel it took over a mountain a half to uh identify it and uh there are probably all the tunnel networks uh underneath the ground where the idf has full operational control so that is going to be a long process that means that um if there is a face of low intensity warfare it's not going to be everywhere it's going to be in certain places where the idf has completely dismantled the hamas battalion such as in the northern gaza strip but it can't happen where um you know you have the political and military leadership as well as probably most of the hostages hidden uh underneath hanu nes even maybe in raffa the problem of raffa is also a political problem because egypt raffa is divided between egypt and gaza and uh thus it will need to uh there is a need for the israeli government to negotiate with egypt about raffa on the gaza side and there is a need for that to explain to the egyptian and to the rest of the international community what will be the kind of regime that will be in gaza the day after pia thank you very much pia kloschenla there in the south of israel well the idf continues to battle the iranian backed terrorist organization hezbollah which is based in lebanon our zakhander is up in northern israel and he joins us now and that the idf has been striking hezbollah pretty decisively today hasn't it it has still hezbollah is claiming responsibility for eight attacks throughout the day including drone infiltrations with these suicide drones that continue to pester these areas throughout the north no apparent casualties although we're still waiting for some of the damage reports to come in we've also got some now clarity some firm numbers coming out of the idf today on the number of casualties in the north nine idf soldiers have fallen in battle here in the north two more have been killed in accidents that have taken place since the military staging after october 7 so nine soldiers in total in southern lebanon hezbollah sorry 11 soldiers in total nine of those killed in the field of battle hezbollah is a different story in southern lebanon with 130 they had they claim have been killed since the hostilities began but if you brought in the scope here to include the other military wings political military wings the other factions and southern syria it's closer to 180 that have been killed throughout different factions hamas pij that also operates in southern lebanon syrian army soldiers that have also been killed so the the scope and in toll of this war is much broader than the initial glance to this conflict would give you it the the amount of casualties that are taking place here are are quite severe and zach it's remarkable isn't it that the un peacekeeping force unifil its mandate was to keep the peace between israel and lebanon i mean are their troops still operating there what is the situation i have spoken to the un force in lebanon the interim force which always strikes me because this interim force has been here since the late 70s they still have upwards of 10 000 peacekeepers in the region and many of those are stationed in the buffer zone we've seen incidents where the idf has fired back at hezbollah and those exchanges have come within meters of un compounds the un has issued statements warning that their unifil forces have come under fire from both sides this is really a difficult situation for them now that they find themselves in the middle but before before october 7th their role was to keep hezbollah from arming in the south and to assist the laf the lebanese armed forces in providing the security in this buffer zone south of the latani river that's all their mandate provides they are not allowed to engage they are supposed to monitor the incoming trucks and military equipment that potentially would bring rockets and weapons into the the buffer zone it's unclear how much success they've had in doing so in the years prior they have had some noted incidents of stopping some movement of rockets and things like that but in the grand scale of what has been moving around this region it probably pales in comparison to the actual number of rockets that hezbollah has situated throughout this region the unifil forces will tell you that they just don't have the mandates able to complete their mission successfully and that they have been positioned in in really an impossible task of attempting to stand between one of the largest non-state actors in the world with a hundred thousand militants in hezbollah and the idf and of course hezbollah's one of its sole purposes as it says is to eliminate israel so really it's a very difficult task and for what comes ahead for the unifil forces they're very concerned i'm hearing about the potential for escalation and where that leaves them with really no mandate to fire back and what would happen should a broader escalation come here in the north thank you very much second just there in the north of israel well martin himmel is with me in the studio and martin we've heard from the idea spokesman daniel hagari in the last few minutes and he's kind of clarified the strategy in the north it says the idf has carried out major airstrikes in recent days trying to push the terrorist group back away from israel's border would you say they're being more proactive in the north now not in a significant way nothing that is going to change the fundamental situation where the northern communities are being strafed with an anti-tank missiles and it's just too dangerous for people to come back there it's going to take a much more significant military response in the absence of a political solution to to affect any sort of change in south lebanon and it's amazing how basically people are ignoring it for now because their minds are focused to the south but it's it can be a much bigger problem than gaza we're talking about an army here we're not talking about militants and with some missiles etc these they have very powerful weapons his below all right martin thank you well the international court of justice says south africa has filed a motion to launch proceedings against israel claiming israeli forces have violated the un convention on genocide during its war against hamas israel's foreign ministry has hit back and called the charge a blood libel israel says hamas is responsible for the suffering of palestinians in the gaza strip by attempting to carry out genocide on october 7th when terrorists invaded southern israel and killed some 1200 people and took around 240 hostage and 129 hostages are still being held so martin him or should israel be concerned about this move by south africa i don't think it's going to be concerned too much by the move by south africa but i think that the issue of the international court is going to be a force to be reckoned with to some degree depending how this conflict moves or doesn't move the more israel goes ahead without international support it's going to become more of an issue as long as the united states is standing behind israel and other countries maybe not in such a active way i don't think it'll be such a big issue and you know there are a lot of accusations that israel is not abiding by international law it insists it's doing everything possible to limit civilian casualties and do you think it's making the case effectively enough on the world stage well i think that there's many other forces involved in this i mean there's people there's forces political forces that want to stop israel to keep us alive the way to do it is to raise the issue of gaza civilians i mean look the syrians killed a million syrian army killed a million people in syria and millions were displaced no one gave a damn frankly in the world stage and uh when it comes to israel every civilian is magnified 10 000 times because there's a lot of political reasons for it all right martin himmel thank you very much thank you well from lebanon to jordan to egypt criticism is mounting against the israeli-american and european leadership all of whom are accused of dehumanizing the palestinians it's not the first time a confrontation between israel and hamas has revealed a gulf between the west and the middle east which has itself experienced several cycles of conflict this time though the gap seems wider than ever as our middle east correspondent arie los iran now reports until october 7th there were high hopes for big changes in the middle east talk of us mediated peace between israel and saudi arabia which in turn would spread to other arab countries created much anticipation but then after thousands of hamas terrorists rampage through southern israeli communities and idf bases slaughtering burning and kidnapping everything in their path the delicate house of cards collapsed the kingdom of saudi arabia affirms its categorical rejection of the continuation of aggression occupation and the forced displacement of gaza's population the kingdom holds the occupation authorities responsible for the crimes committed against the palestinian people and their properties we are certain that the only way to guarantee security peace and stability in the region is to end the occupation siege and settlements but sidelining israel's saudi normalization for the unforeseeable future was only one of the effects of that dark october 7th on the region it also saw the solidification of the iranian axis of proxies from iraq to lebanon all the way to yemen terran's branches all began to attack israel we're in a multi arena war we are being attacked from seven different sectors gaza lebanon syria judaea and samaria iraq yemen and iran we have already responded and taken action and i say here in the most explicit way anyone who acts against us is a potential target there is no immunity for anyone in an attempt to get a better understanding of how the region as a whole was affected by the october 7th attacks i-24 news reached out to journalists in the region to give their perspective one of them is a journalist from yemen we blurred his face and distorted his voice for his safety speaking with an israeli based news outlet perhaps the most surprising front to many has been the continuous drone and missile attacks by the houthis in yemen towards israeli territory and then at international commercial ships navigating through the red sea the yemen armed forces affirmed their continued support for the palestinian people as part of the religious moral and humanitarian duty and confirmed the continuation of operations in the red sea and the arabian sea against israeli ships or those heading to the ports of occupied palestine until the food and medicine needed by the gaza strip are brought in but according to the journalist in yemen the houthis are simply the ones pulling the trigger in service of their patrons yemen beyond emboldening the iranian axis the october 7th attacks also seem to have affected the streets in many of the region's capitals in support of the palestinians i see a lot of change among the awareness of of ordinary people who never really paid attention to to political issues of the palestinian situation i seen especially in arab countries george and egypt southern abia many of the countries are really much more involved now and i think we've seen also progressives and young people around the world taking up the palestinian cause in a much more powerful way than we've ever seen before like the journalist in yemen khutab 2 believes that the war in gaza has put a strain on israel's existing peace agreements with jordan and egypt the both peace streets have held on so far but on a very thin ice i think that there is strong opposition in both countries to their countries continuing the peace agreements but more importantly i think people want uh civilian lives to be saved besides threats there are some silver linings that have emerged from the horrific attacks on israel and ensuing war in gaza not only the american-led maritime coalition aimed at ensuring the safe navigation in the red sea but that saudi arabia egypt and jordan all intercepted houthi drones and missiles over their territories on their way to israel an indication that jewsland does have shared strategic interests in the balance of power in the middle east well i think arab countries are trying to um be peacemakers as much as they can they're trying to provide the material support to people who are in terrible need uh and uh i don't think we've seen a a major shift especially in countries that have had normalization relations with israel the leaders are still insisting on keeping some form of relationship even though public opinion has changed and so with the war in gaza in full steam and further escalation with his balloon the horizon the october 7th attacks seem to have changed not only israel but the region as a whole now israel finds itself at a critical juncture a regional war or increased regional cooperation whether or not it's up to israel to decide what the outcome will be that still remains to be seen well the idf spokesman daniel has been giving his nightly press briefing let's take a quick listen in the northern front in the last couple of days we have completed a wide-scale series of attacks using fighter jets tanks and artillery against hezbollah targets we attack these targets across lebanon and this included launch pads military compounds and terror infrastructures in addition we attack terror cells and killed terrorists in open areas headquarters and villages we continue to carry out attacks and to damage the deployment of hezbollah near the border with israel the deployment of hezbollah near the border will never be the same there we are the idf spokesman daniel higari giving his nightly press briefing and clarifying the strategy against the iranian backed terrorist group hezbollah in southern lebanon well a quick recap on this day 84 of israel's war with hamas there were sirens blaring in both northern and southern israel today and the idf as you just heard has been carrying out extensive strikes in southern lebanon targeting hezbollah military positions there's been a Saudi media report about an Israeli airstrike in Damascus which reportedly killed 11 members of iran's revolutionary guards israel neither confirms nor denies such reports iran says that the report is false and in Gaza the idf has been expanding its operations in the south destroying tunnels and seizing weapons and discovering an apartment that was at some stage used as a hideout by the hamas leader yaya sinwar we'll have another update for you shortly stay with us this is i-24 news is in a state of war families completely done down in their beds we have no idea where she has our soldiers are fighting on the front line but the general perception is something that certainly needs to to be fought as well we'll be watching i-24 news coming to you from televieve the idf says it carried out an extensive strike in southern lebanon today targeting launch positions and a hezbollah military compound and in Gaza the idf says it is expanding its operations in the south and has revealed the discovery of an apartment that was used as a hideout by the hamas leader yaya sinwar well with me in the studio this hour martin himel is a political analyst and international security analyst thank you very much for being with us martin so the idf has revealed this apartment with an extensive tunnel network connected to the basement assign that yaya sinwar managed to escape capture once again well i i don't think it's like he's on the run and the army is right out on his heels and he's just running from place to place i think it's probably a little more sophisticated than that we don't know exactly what it is we don't know if he's got hostages with him we don't even know if he's in Gaza let's face it we don't know where he is maybe the army does but we don't know and but the bottom line is he's somewhere and he's still operating and as long as his command and control is operating then Hamas is operating in some way and of course he is uh we don't know where he is um we don't know where the 129 hostages are either which is a priority for the idf isn't it yes it is i i sure hope they know a lot more than what we know that would be very good um but uh it is a priority and not only is it a priority though it's it's sort of like conflicting with the other goal which is step up the war and try to push Hamas uh or weaken Hamas further and further because uh you can't fight the war in the same time free the hostages so easily and Hamas has made it perfectly clear that it won't release hostages till there's some sort of ceasefire some sort of permanent arrangement and of course there is a lot of international pressure on israel um as as the war continues the united states has managed to uh veto any resolution which we call for an immediate ceasefire we did have a resolution um last week but the UN security council is holding another meeting uh on Gaza tonight what is the purpose of that i think it's just more of the same it's try to generate international pressure to stop the fighting in order to basically preserve a Hamas's existence and keep israel from finishing off the job that it wants to finish it's under the excuse or the umbrella about uh the gaza civilians well of course they're suffering terribly and they are suffering a great deal but there's a lot more politics behind that involved in an attempt for to try to preserve Hamas somewhere and um in terms of politics looking a bit closer to home um there is um a reluctance on the part of the government to talk about what Gaza might look like once Hamas is hopefully destroyed well this is the most troubling thing i mean the young men and women are dying in Gaza fighting uh giving their lives sacrificing so much and this government seems to be chained by politics uh you can't fight a war without an end game you can't fight a war without a strategic goal and looking what is going to what Gaza's going to look like after this is all over and it doesn't seem like this government can even get to square one because of politics politics is superseding the imperative of trying to reach some sort of understanding what to do there and when we look at the polls prime minister Netanyahu has uh sunk um catastrophically uh surprising in the polls he's polling at around 15 seats if a vote was held today right um we are seeing others kind of popping up aren't we perhaps smelling an opportunity here we've had the former prime minister Netanyahu Bennett gave an interview uh to the wall street journal um you know i've gallant responding to that i mean just where where do you think we are with the politics is it inevitable that we will have to have an election at some stage it's not inevitable uh for at least three years it depends on five Likudniks or Likud party people or coalition people saying i'm not staying in the government that proves to be a very difficult bar to overcome uh unless there's some massive protests of some sort which is going to pressure this government out of its office but it will take some incredible pressure if that's ever going to happen but yes people are smelling politics and Neftali V gave a uh an interview showing that he's a tough guy he can stage two operations in Iran despite not going through the censor saying that that's why gallant got angry but also because gallant's firing back politics as well that's what's most troubling about all this is all this politics is coming out at a time when people when soldiers are dying in in the war and uh you do hope that Israel's leaders would rise above politics right now and really care for what's best for the country right quite i mean 168 troops have now fallen in the fighting in Gaza um a very difficult pill for Israelis to swallow and we're yet to have that big moment aren't we in this war uh nearly 13 weeks on i don't know if there will be a big moment uh that doesn't mean they won't significantly erode Hamas they they're going to put Hamas into a corner in Rafa along the border with Egypt it's far from certain that is what's going to go into Rafa because there's a million and a half Palestinian refugees right now in that area so it could be that they'll transform to a more mobile uh in and out type of warfare that's going to involve a lot less troops without some major statement because after all Sinwar has been caught too and even if he is caught they'll be a replacement uh the question is the true effect is what kind of alternative arrangement for Gaza and running Gaza that's the key thing that was the best way to get to replace Hamas but that can't be done without the government deciding what it wants all right Martin Hemel for now thank you very much let's head to the south of Israel our senior correspondent Pierre Closchen is standing by and uh Pierre we've just been talking about the significant challenges to the IDF as it seeks to uh strike a decisive blow against Hamas we're coming up to 13 weeks of war a very heavy toll um for the Israelis 168 troops have fallen and we learned that uh Hamas leader Sinwar evaded capture yet again well the IDF believes that the Yahya Sinwar is hiding in the underground tunnels of uh Chanyunas and this is why you have now uh operating in and around Chanyunas something like seven brigades plus a division of commando unit which is operating in the heart of Chanyunas all that in order to try and identify all the tunnel shafts and start scoring the tunnel network that is underneath the the this city now the problem is uh Hamas as a whole brigade in Chanyunas so there's a lot of fighting and at the same time it's a very long it's a long and hard just process to dismantle tunnels nobody in the world including in the IDF has a real solution a fast solution to the dismantlement of tunnels Israel uses as far as we know some technology uh robots uh sniffing dogs uh and other technologies that we don't know but it takes a long time today the IDF released for publication the fact that they uncovered headquarter uh underground headquarter for the political leadership of Hamas for Yahya Sinwar in the in Gaza city Gaza city which has been under Israeli control except for one neighborhood al-Daraj Tufar where there is fighting but the rest of the cities under control and now even if there was some delay in announcing the discovery of that tunnel it took over a mountain a half to identify it and there are probably all the tunnel networks uh underneath the ground where the IDF has full operational control so that is going to be a long process that means that if there is a face of low intensity warfare it's not going to be everywhere it's going to be in certain places where the IDF has completely dismantled the Hamas battalion such as in the northern Gaza Strip but it can't happen where you know you have the political and military leadership as well as probably most of the hostages hidden uh underneath Hanunez even maybe in Rafah the problem of Rafah is also a political problem because Egypt Rafah is divided between Egypt and Gaza and thus it will need to uh there is a need for the Israeli government to negotiate with Egypt about Rafah on the Gazan side and there is a need for that to explain to the Egyptian and to the rest of the international community what will be the kind of regime that will be in Gaza the day after. Pierre, thank you very much. Pierre Klosschenla there in the south of Israel. Well the IDF continues to battle the Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah which is based in Lebanon. Our Zach Andrews is up in northern Israel and he joins us now and that the IDF has been striking Hezbollah pretty decisively today hasn't it? It has still Hezbollah is claiming responsibility for eight attacks throughout the day including drone infiltrations with these uh suicide drones that continue to pester these areas throughout the north no apparent casualties although we're still waiting for some of the damage reports to come in. We've also got some now clarity some firm numbers coming out of the IDF today on the number of casualties in the north nine IDF soldiers have fallen in battle here in the north two more have been killed in accidents that have taken place since the military staging after october 7th so nine soldiers in total in southern Lebanon Hezbollah sorry 11 soldiers in total nine of those killed in the field of battle uh Hezbollah is a different story in southern Lebanon with 130 they had they claim have been killed since the hostilities began but if you brought in the scope here to include the other military wings political military wings the other factions and southern Syria it's closer to 180 that have been killed throughout different factions Hamas Pij that also operates in southern Lebanon Syrian army uh soldiers that have also been killed so the the scope and in toll of this war is much broader than the uh initial glance to this conflict would give you it the the amount of casualties that are taking place here are are quite severe and Zach it's remarkable isn't it that uh the UN peacekeeping force uh unifil um its mandate was to keep the peace between uh israel and lebanon i mean are their troops still operating there what is the situation i have spoken to the uh un force in lebanon the interim force which always strikes me because this interim force has been here since the late 70s they still have upwards of 10 000 peacekeepers in the region and many of those are stationed in the buffer zone we've seen incidents where the idf has fired back at hezbollah and those exchanges have come within uh meters of un compounds the un has issued statements warning that their unifil forces have come under fire from both sides this is really a difficult situation for them now that they find themselves in the middle but before before october 7th their role was to keep hezbollah from arming in the south and to assist the laf the lebanese armed forces in providing the security in this buffer zone south of the latani river that's all their mandate provides they are not allowed to engage they are supposed to monitor the incoming um trucks and military equipment that potentially would bring rockets and weapons into the the buffer zone uh it's unclear how much success they've had in doing so in the years prior they have had some noted incidents of um stopping some movement of rockets and things like that but in the grand scale of what has been moving around this region it probably pales in comparison to the actual number of rockets that hezbollah has situated throughout this region the unifil forces will tell you that they just don't have the mandates able to uh complete their mission successfully and that they have been positioned in in really an impossible task of of attempting to uh stand between one of the largest non-state actors in the world with a hundred thousand militants in hezbollah and the idf and of course hezbollah is one of its sole purposes as it says is to eliminate israel so uh really it's a very difficult task and for what comes ahead for the unifil forces um they're very concerned i'm hearing about the potential for escalation and where that leaves them with really no mandate to fire back and what would happen should a broader escalation uh come in here in the north zack thank you very much that can just there in the north of israel well martin himmel is with me in the studio and martin we've heard from the idf spokesman uh daniel hagari um in the last few minutes and he's kind of clarified uh the strategy in the north um it says the idf has carried out major airstrikes in recent days um trying to push the terrorist group back away from israel's border would you say they're being more proactive in the north now not in a significant way uh nothing that is going to change the fundamental situation where uh the northern communities are being astraved with an anti-tank uh missiles and uh it's just too dangerous for people to come back there it's going to take a much more significant military response in the absence of a political solution to uh to uh affect any sort of change in south lebanon and it's amazing how basically people are ignoring it for now because their minds are focused to the south but it's it can be a much bigger problem than gaza we're talking about an army here we're not talking about militants uh and uh with uh some missiles etc these they have very powerful weapons his below all right martin thank you or the international court of justice uh says south africa has filed a motion to launch proceedings against israel claiming israeli forces have violated the un convention on genocide during its war against hamas israel's foreign ministry has hit back and called the charge a blood libel israel says hamas is responsible for the suffering of palestinians in the gaza strip by attempting to carry out genocide on october 7th when terrorists invaded southern israel and killed some 1200 people and took around 240 hostage and 129 hostages are still being held so martin him or should israel be concerned about this move by south africa i don't think it's going to be concerned too much by the move by south africa but i think that the issue of the international court is going to be a force to be reckoned with to some degree depending how this conflict moves or doesn't move the more israel goes ahead without international support it's going to become more of an issue as long as the united states is standing behind israel and other countries maybe not in such a active way i don't think it'll be such a big issue and um you know there are a lot of um accusations um that israel is not abiding by international law it insists it's doing everything possible to limit civilian casualties do you think it's making the case effectively enough on the world stage well i think that there's many other forces involved in this i mean uh there's people there's forces political forces that want to stop israel to keep hamas alive the way to do it is to raise the issue of of gaza civilians i mean look the syrians killed a million syrian army killed a million people in syria and millions were displaced no one gave a damn frankly in in the world's stage and uh when it comes to israel uh every civilian is magnified 10 000 times because there's a lot of political reasons for it all right martin himl thank you very much thank you well from lebanon to jordan to egypt criticism is mounting against the israeli american and european leadership all of whom are accused of dehumanizing the palestinians it's not the first time a confrontation between israel and hamas has revealed a gulf between the west and the middle east which has itself experienced several cycles of conflict this time though the gap seems wider than ever as our middle east correspondent aria los iran now reports until october 7th there were high hopes for big changes in the middle east talk of us mediated peace between israel and saudi arabia which in turn would spread to other arab countries created much anticipation but then after thousands of hamas terrorists rampaged through southern israeli communities and idf bases slaughtering burning and kidnapping everything in their path the delicate house of cards collapsed the kingdom of saudi arabia affirms its categorical rejection of the continuation of aggression occupation and the forced displacement of gaza's population the kingdom holds the occupation authorities responsible for the crimes committed against the palestinian people and their properties we are certain that the only way to guarantee security peace and stability in the region is to end the occupation siege and settlements but sidelining israel's saudi normalization for the unforeseeable future was only one of the effects of that dark october 7th on the region it also saw the solidification of the iranian axis of proxies from iraq to lebanon all the way to yemen terran's branches all began to attack israel we're in a multi arena war we are being attacked from seven different sectors gaza lebanon syria judaea and samaria iraq yemen and iran we have already responded and taken action iraq and i say here in the most explicit way anyone who acts against us is a potential target there is no immunity for anyone in an attempt to get a better understanding of how the region as a whole was affected by the october 7th attacks i-24 news reached out to journalists in the region to give their perspective one of them is a journalist from yemen we blurred his face and distorted his voice for his safety speaking with an israeli based news outlet perhaps the most surprising front to many has been the continuous drone and missile attacks by the houthis in yemen towards israeli territory and then at international commercial ships navigating through the red sea the yemen armed forces affirmed their continued support for the palestinian people as part of the religious moral and humanitarian duty and confirmed the continuation of operations in the red sea and the arabian sea against israeli ships or those heading to the ports of occupied palestine until the food and medicine needed by the gaza strip are brought in but according to the journalist in yemen the houthis are simply the ones pulling the trigger in service of their patrons beyond emboldening the iranian axis the october 7th attacks also seem to have affected the streets in many of the region's capitals in support of the palestinians i see a lot of change among the awareness of of ordinary people who never really paid attention to to political issues of the palestinian situation i seen especially in arab countries george and egypt south arabia many of the countries are really much more involved now and i think we've seen also progressives and young people around the world taking up the palestinian cause in a much more powerful way than we've ever seen before like the journalist in yemen khutab too believes that the war in gaza has put a strain on israel's existing peace agreements with jordan and egypt the both peace treaties have held on so far but on a very thin ice i think that uh there is strong opposition in both countries to their countries continuing the peace agreements but more importantly i think people want uh civilian lives to be saved besides threats there are some silver linings that have emerged from the horrific attacks on israel and ensuing war in gaza not only the american led maritime coalition aimed at ensuring the safe navigation in the red sea but that saudi arabia egypt and jordan all intercepted houthi drones and missiles over their territories on their way to israel an indication that jerusalem does have shared strategic interests in the balance of power in the middle east well i think arab countries are trying to be peacemakers as much as they can they're trying to provide the material support to people who are in terrible need uh and uh i don't think we've seen a a major shift especially in countries that have had normalization relations with israel the leaders are still insisting on in keeping some form of relationship even though public opinion has and so with the war in gaza in full steam and further escalation with his balloon horizon, the October 7th attacks seem to have changed not only Israel, but the region as a whole. Now Israel finds itself at a critical juncture, a regional war or increased regional cooperation. Whether or not it's up to Israel to decide what the outcome will be, that still remains to be seen. Well, the IDF spokesman, Daniel Higari, has been giving his nightly press briefing. Let's take a quick listen. In the northern front in the last couple of days, we have completed a wide-scale series of attacks using fighter jets, tanks and artillery against Hezbollah targets. We attack these targets across Lebanon, and this included launch pads, military compounds and terror infrastructures. In addition, we attack terror cells and killed terrorists in open areas, headquarters and villages. We continue to carry out attacks and to damage the deployment of Hezbollah near the border with Israel. The deployment of Hezbollah near the border will never be the same. There we are, the IDF spokesman, Daniel Higari, giving his nightly press briefing and clarifying the strategy against the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Well, a quick recap on this day, 84 of Israel's war with Hamas. There was sirens blaring in both northern and southern Israel today, and the IDF, as you just heard, has been carrying out extensive strikes in southern Lebanon targeting Hezbollah military positions. There's been a Saudi media report about an Israeli airstrike in Damascus, which reportedly killed 11 members of Iran's revolutionary guards. Israel neither confirms nor denies such reports. Iran says that the report is false, and in Gaza, the IDF has been expanding its operations in the south, destroying tunnels and seizing weapons and discovering an apartment that was at some stage used as a hideout by the Hamas leader, Yaya Sinouar. We'll have another update. If we shortly stay with us, this is I-24 News. Gun down in their beds. We have no idea where she is. Our soldiers are fighting on the front line, but the general perception is something that certainly needs to be fought as well. You're watching I-24 News on this day 84 of Israel's war with Hamas, and Israeli media is reporting that Qatar has told Israel Hamas no longer demands a complete end to the war as a condition for freeing hostages. The Hamas leadership was due in Cairo this Friday to discuss Egypt's three-stage plan for a ceasefire, but Hamas cancelled. Well, for more on that, we can go now to southern Israel. Our senior correspondent, Pierre Kloshendler, is with us now. So, Pierre Hamas, the Hamas leadership was supposed to arrive in Cairo. It cancelled that meeting, and we're now hearing that Qatar says Hamas may be willing to forego a complete ceasefire in exchange for some of the hostages. Right, we need to be very careful with that, not to give too much hope to the families of the hostages. But what we understand is that Osama Hamdan, one of the political leaders of Hamas based in Lebanon, said earlier that the Hamas delegation that was supposed to be arriving to Cairo and start mediation with their Egyptian counterpart Abbas Kamel, the head of the internal security of Egypt, will not be coming to Cairo. Now, we know that there have been two main mediation axes that Israel and Hamas have been using in the past, Cairo, Egypt, and Qatar. Now, there have been in the past few weeks, in the past couple of weeks, I think two meetings with the Qantari Prime Minister and the head of the Mossad, Dedy Barnea, one in Poland, another one in Vienna, I think, in Europe anyway. And it seems now that Qatar has conveyed a message to Dedy Barnea, the head of the Israeli Mossad, that Hamas is not insisting any longer in principle to have an end of the war and a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza Strip as a precondition for the release of, for the opening of negotiations for the release of hostages. Now, is it true? I don't know, because some experts are saying that Yerkesi Noir, who holds the key to the liberation of hostages in Gaza, is maybe trying to survive the ground offensive from the tunnels. And as long as Israel is looking for him, and there are so many tunnels, and then is the Gaza Strip, he may be trying to hope that international pressure on Israel will bear fruit and thus that there won't be necessary a negotiation to liberate the hostages. So we need to be very careful with that. But maybe the fact that Hamas delegation canceled its arrival to Cairo means that the Qatari option could be valid. Yeah, as you say, Pierre, this is just a report, isn't it? There's a great deal of speculation as expected about Sinoir's intentions, whether he has any intention of negotiating at all, or whether he plans to stay to the bitter end, or as you've pointed out, whether he is actually still in Gaza at all. Right. We know, for instance, from various Israeli publications that Abbas Kamel, the head of the internal security services in Egypt, came to Rafah on the Egyptian side to have a telephone connection with Yerkesi Noir. That shows you how difficult it is to reach out to Sinoir. And maybe Sinoir does not want to be reached out. There are different options. The political leadership sits in Qatar, in Istanbul, in Lebanon. They don't experience the war. Yerkesi Noir is inside the Gaza Strip. It's two very different viewpoints. They don't have the same experience. And as a result, there could be some differences between the leadership of Hamas abroad and inside the Gaza Strip. And we don't know where it's going at this point. Pierre, thank you very much. Pierre Klashendler there in Southern Israel. Well, the IDF spokesman Daniel Higari has given his nightly press briefing and has clarified Israel's strategy in the north, where the IDF is battling the Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah. Let's take a listen. In the northern front in the last couple of days, we have completed a wide-scale series of attacks using fighter jets, tanks, and artillery against Hezbollah targets. We attack these targets across Lebanon, and this included launch pads, military compounds, and terror infrastructures. In addition, we attack terror cells and killed terrorists in open areas, headquarters, and villages. We continue to carry out attacks and to damage the deployment of Hezbollah near the border with Israel. The deployment of Hezbollah near the border will never be the same. Well, let's head to the north of Israel now. We're joined by our correspondent, Zach Anders. Zach, so the IDF spokesman Higari there kind of rounding up what you've been telling us throughout the day about these strikes by the IDF on Hezbollah targets an infrastructure inside southern Lebanon. And quite deep in some places, too, 20 miles from the border. These are strikes that are, again, hitting locations where when we see the strikes on social media and the plumes of smoke that rise from buildings, the questions that we have that will mostly go unanswered until the IDF, they will clarify hopefully someday what exactly was in each location. But these launch sites for the long range missiles, the Birken rockets supplied by Iran, where they are located is of great interest to everyone in Israel, as these have a significant range targeting even central and southern Israel from these launch locations. Now, the Israeli estimates are over 100,000 of these rockets of variable types exist in launch sites throughout the country, potentially most of them congregated in central and southern Lebanon. But there's no certainty in these points. So when the IDF has been striking deeper and deeper, of course, they haven't told exactly where these sites are and have kept that operational security for themselves. But one of the big questions being in the many strikes that we've seen since this conflict began, how many of these launch sites have been eliminated? How many of them have been found, of course, too? And how many remain? And Hagaari says as well that there is an effort to push Hezbollah back from the border so there can be this kind of buffer zone. Yeah, it's been curious in the last week and a half to to see Hezbollah themselves admit that they would pull forces back away from this border. And they also attributed heavy IDF, IAF strikes as being part of the reason that they were experiencing high casualties and wanted to protect some of their more elite forces. It's still unclear of the 100,000 or so Hezbollah members in their rank and file are still located below this, what would be a buffer zone per the UNSC 1701 vote south of the Lutani River? How many persist or still remain is unclear, but we do see the casualty count continue to rise. Hezbollah announces 130 of their fighters have been killed since October 7th in southern Lebanon. More than 10 have been killed. Hezbollah members have been killed in southern Syria as well. And the numbers continue to escalate and spiral for them. So unsustainable on this path and it's just more questions than answers really as to where their leadership is thinking, where their leadership is taking this conflict and what they see out of it. Zach, thank you very much. Zach Andrews there in the north of Israel. Well, the UN Security Council has meant to discuss Israel once again this time to condemn its actions in the West Bank, warning of the risk of original spillover. The Assistant Secretary General Khaled Hiari told the Security Council that recent weeks have seen some of the most intensive Israeli operations in the West Bank since the second into Fada. Here's how the Israeli ambassador to the UN responded. Just yesterday morning, rockets were fired from Lebanon at population centers in Haifa and Akko in northern Israel. Two days ago, rockets were fired at the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona. And three days ago, Hezbollah fired guided anti-tank missiles at St. Mary's Church in the western Galilee, injuring 11 people. Yet these brazen attacks on civilians, towns, cities, and holy sites do not warrant an urgent briefing here in this council. Do these attacks sound like a mere spillover? Is this violence occurring magically on its own? Is it not clear that genocidal terrorists are seeking to murder Israeli citizens every single day, every single day? Well, to talk about all of that, I'm joined in the studio by Dan Perry, International Affairs Analyst and former European Middle East editor at the Associated Press. Good to see you again, Dan. Thanks for joining us. Let's start with this report. And I should stress it is just a report in Israeli media that Qatar has communicated to the Israelis that Hamas is no longer demanding as a precondition the end of the war before it would talk about possibly releasing hostages. What do you make of that? Well, if it is true, then that's an enormous breakthrough because their condition that the end of the war has to accompany any release of hostages was an impossible one. I do not think Israel could conceivably agree to end the war and leave Hamas and power in Gaza. And when they have the option of continuing the war and trying to again release the hostages that way, I cannot say I observe it to be working well, but that is currently a strategy. So it gives us reason to hope. But as Pierre said, we need to be very careful not to assume it's a done deal. Yeah, absolutely, because the families of the hostages are going through hell with these reports and cancel reports and all the rest of it. But does that to a certain extent, vindicate those who have said the only way to get the hostages back is to keep up the military pressure on Hamas? Yeah, it does. Because if Siouar indeed has changed his position, that would appear to be, so Christianially, it would appear to be a result of the escalating pressure on him, presumably around Hanyunas. And I do believe he is in Gaza. And I don't know how suicidal he is. I have been saying for a long time that a way out might be to enable Siouar and his fellow mobsters to leave Gaza and go to Qatar or some other such place. Or Algeria. Or Algeria or Turkey. Everyone seems to be such a fan of the Hamas. Do you think a part of this is an element of competition between Egypt and Qatar? Both countries want to be seen as the ones to end this war. Well, it's constructive competition if so. Of course, Qatar has been at loggerheads with Egypt and Saudi Arabia and most of the rest of the Gulf Council for much of the past decade. For a while they were totally shunned. I say, you know, have at it. And meanwhile, part of the Egyptian plan was a lot of focus on a post-war Gaza and a technocratic government kind of reconstruction. You know, a civilian Palestinian government, Palestinians having a say in their own affairs. And there is a reluctance to talk about what Gaza would look like after the war here in Israel. A part of Israel? Well, certainly in the government. Because the government cannot agree. There are two versions of the government. The one that existed prior to October 7th is an extreme right-wing government. There is no way they would allow the PA to go back to Gaza. As for the day after, as with many things in life, Israel has to choose a less bad option. None of the options are great. The U.S. believes, and I too believe that the least bad option is the Palestinian Authority and some rejuvenated, reinvigorated, new-improved version, perhaps with a new leader. Of course, Abbas is 88, and he may have outlived his usefulness, or at least overstated. And he's, by the way, not legitimate in any way. His election to president, I believe, was a four-year election, and it was well over a decade ago, or meant to be a four-year term, which expired well over a decade ago. So yeah, when Israel says, when Netanyahu says that that cannot be the solution, he does not alternatively offer a more constructive solution. So what we're left with is eternal Israeli occupation in Gaza. And that will look very ugly. It'll involve an insurrection. And in the end, Israel will leave anyway. Right. We're coming up to the 13th week of the war. 168 IDF troops have fallen. There has been a high civilian death toll in Gaza as well. There is a lot of international pressure on Israel. We just saw the Security Council meeting once again this time to talk about the West Bank. But how long can the Americans keep that pressure off Israel? I think it depends if Israel succeeds in prosecuting this war in a way that reduces the pace of civilian casualties. That's basically the issue. That's what's causing all this foment in the U.S. That's what's causing all this unhappiness on the part of the Biden administration. And indeed, this is why Biden and Blinken are pressing Israel to move to phase three, the consolidation phase of the fighting in which the attacks are more surgical. And that, conceivably, could last a long time. But this, I mean, if it's true that Israel indeed caused a death of over 20,000 people in just over two months, that cannot continue over four months or six months. And it's also causing something else, which is heartbreaking to see. Because the global media tends to be a little superficial, indeed, a lot of human beings tend to be a little superficial. It becomes a numbers game. And of course, more people died in Gaza than on October 7th. And October 7th should be remembered as a singularity. The stuff, the things, the horrors that happened on October 7th. And some of that, the sexual violence that was discussed in the New York Times investigation, is unforgettable and absolutely shattering. And I think should not be allowed to be, you know, removed from the discourse as if there's some kind of like series of events and a cycle of violence, because that is not what happened here. All right, Dan Poe, thank you for that. Well, war never really left us. But in the last two years, its scale and impact on international stability have ratcheted up. Western militaries have, over the last decade, been reorienting themselves from fighting counterinsurgencies to combating states such as Russia and China, or what lessons will be learned from the fighting in Ukraine and on Israel's borders with more correspondent Robert Swift. The Israel-Gaza fence was protected by some of the best border security technology in the world. Remote gun turrets, underground sensors to detect tunneling and surveillance balloons. The aqua barrier was built on the assumption that we have a very high technology, singing, visiting the other things that we will tell us when someone is approaching the fence. This one collapsed. Hamas simply went through it with demolition charges and pickup trucks, overwhelming the defences with force of numbers and a few drones. Believing that its high-tech defences sufficed, Israel let other more basic considerations fall by the wayside. Israel adopted, in the last, I think, 20 years, asymmetric balance between technology and the number of units, manpower that it needs on the field. It looks like Israel thought in its calculation that the high technology will bring advantage to the battlefield instead of represent of manpower inside it. Since the October 7th attack, a number of former Israeli generals have argued for an expanded IDF budget and footprint. Ukraine, fighting on a very different battlefield, also sees its manning levels as a problem. Unfortunately, manpower is still super important because we get back to the scales of massive armies, of million strong armies, which is absolutely weird, which is absolutely unnatural to the state of our modern society. Locked in a stalemate with a larger foe, its chief of staff argues that advances in technologies like electronic warfare are needed to break the deadlock. In the 21st century, the development of science and as a result the advancement of armaments and military equipment inevitably led to the changes in the tactics of its use. The enemy didn't stay behind either. You see what is happening specifically in the last few days. We have a powerful confrontation, specifically in the technological aspect. Both of the wars defining 2023 show a blurring of low and high technologies on the battlefield. In Ukraine, the first large example of state on state drone warfare, the Hawitzer, the Shovel and the Trench, as seen on the fields of the First World War, are as important as the quadcopter. And in Gaza, urban siege warfare reminiscent of Stalingrad is being waged by the Middle East's most technologically advanced military. But low and high tech solutions should not be viewed as opposites in conflict, but as complementary. Israel will continue to be a country that relies very much on technology, but we have to understand that there are areas and places that you cannot rely only solely on technology. You have to go sometimes back to human beings and sometimes to technologies that are not always the cutting edge. The infantry soldier on the ground present in war for millennia can become a high tech tool when equipped with the latest weapons, sensors and communications devices. Even a badly equipped insurgent can become part of the developing information war space when kitted out with a GoPro and an internet connection. Kiev has repeatedly demonstrated the significance of this front in modern war. Ukraine and Gaza's battles have shown that often a low tech solution can be the best counter to a high tech innovation. So we have a pretty weird situation in which simple but smart and cheap solutions really change things on the battlefield. As can be seen in the use of trenches or cage armor to protect from the prying eyes and drop munitions of drones. Both wars have also shown that quantity has a quality all of its own and that high tech doesn't need to mean expensive. Whether that means in terms of expendable munitions or massed infantry a lesson that western militaries many of which have downsized in recent decades may wish to heed. Don't be in a hurry as Israel did to move ahead and to make your armed forces let's say much more smaller in order to give the technology to serve you instead of them of them. No it's coming together. As the threat of state on state warfare grows western militaries will take heed to the developing technological shifts on the battlefields of Ukraine and Israel or sooner or later learn the hard way. It's not true that the era of wars is over unfortunately that's not true. No peace is guaranteed absolutely not peace and guaranteed and moreover there is an illusion that western nations can have small armies well armed armies of motivated professionals who want to do that unfortunately that may not be true because the the epoch of universal peace that we hoped for in the west in here it seemed to be over. Well before their world was turned upside down on October 7th Israelis had been very much preoccupied with domestic politics. Benjamin Netanyahu's government seemed determined to push through a controversial judicial reform ignoring massive street protests and numerous warnings from Washington but in Israel's darkest hour those differences were swept away and its strongest ally did not disappoint our senior diplomatic correspondent Owen Altsman reports. The fleeting moment that encapsulates a year a president from the silent generation speaking up on the legacy of the American bond with Israel the chaos of war afoot the chaos on the campuses to come and an 80-year-old president left to stand by the status quo. Israel has the right to respond indeed has a duty to respond to these vicious attacks, atrocities, I've been sickening. Where is Israel? Let's make no mistake. The most passionately pro-Israel speech in history said leading expert Michael Oren saying that the Jewish people would quote always remember and cherish it and the speech has remained a striking singular memory swallowed by an unruly reality. The scenes from Gaza that muddled U.S. policy the scenes from American streets and campuses that devoured the sense of belonging and support that Biden wanted to deliver with the administration moving soon enough to make clear it wants this war behind it the series of visits of high-level officials meant to walk Israel toward that end the message of the Secretary of State from mid-October and then from the year's end you may be strong enough on your own to defend yourself but as long as America exists you will never ever have to. It's clear that the conflict will move and needs to move to a lower intensity phase and Dr. Gay at Harvard does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment yes or no it can be depending on the context and all the while the campuses and streets for a wave of angry protests without precedent for a rising fear of anti-Semitism that few American Jews expected a crisis for an American Jewish liberalism that had always carefully cultivated the political center only to now see that political center evaporate replaced by the angry right and the angry left our tax dollars have gone to fund colonization apartheid crimes against humanity and we're sick of it the people want Palestinian liberation we unequivocally don't equate our colonizers with the colonized or the occupiers with the occupied oppressed people have a right to resist and defend themselves by any means necessary and so the story of 2023 is less about a heroic older president and more about the young generation that will inherit him poll after poll has shown the protests are not in aberration America's Gen Z does not like Israel does not like Biden and may not like the political center the problem is so big and so much about America that Israel may not be able to solve it numbers that could one day put the us-israel alliance in danger numbers that Israel might not be able to reverse a message for 2024 and for the uncertain decades ahead well that brings us to the end of this edition many thanks for watching do stay with us here on i24 news much well said to come is in a state of war families completely done down in their beds we have no idea where she has our soldiers are fighting on the front line but the general perception is something that certainly needs to to be fought as well 24 Israel bajo ataque is 24 en español trail analysis y la información de los acontecimientos de la guerra espadas de hierro entrevistas exclusivas reportes desde la zona de guerra la reacción de los países hispano parlantes en 24 el único medio en español que te mantiene informado y conectado con la comunidad latina en israel en 24 únicamente en i24 news