Middle East, Biden-Netanyahu phone call. Attacks on Gaza continue

Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu had a telephone conversation, during which they discussed the evolution of the war in Gaza. The phone call between the two, reported by the White House, came a day after the adoption of a UN Security Council resolution calling for more aid to civilians in the Strip but not a truce, a resolution that was passed with the United States abstaining. States and Russia. And it arrived on the day that the Wall Street Journal published a reconstruction about Biden and Netanyahu: according to the newspaper, which cites well-informed sources, a few days after the Hamas attack on October 7 in southern Israel, the October 11, The US president persuaded the Israeli prime minister to stop a pre-emptive strike against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, warning him that this attack could trigger a wider regional war. The reconstruction of the American newspaper was quickly denied by Netanyahu’s office, which defined the article as “incorrect”.

According to the WSJ’s reconstruction, Israeli warplanes were in the air awaiting orders when Biden spoke to Netanyahu and told him to reflect on the consequences of such an action. “Israel had intelligence, which the United States considered unreliable, that Hezbollah attackers were preparing to cross the border as part of a multipronged attack,” the WSJ reports. But Netanyahu’s office made it known that “already on the first day of the war, Prime Minister Netanyahu decided that Israel would work first to achieve a decisive victory in the south (Gaza ed.), while discouraging an attack in the north (Lebanon ed.) ” and that “this policy was adopted by the war cabinet.”

New Israeli attacks continued to hit Gaza in the hours following the UN Council meeting: 76 Palestinians, all members of the same extended family, were killed in an airstrike that hit a building in Gaza City on Friday night. The Strip’s civil protection, which reported the incident, said that the victims also included women and children. While an attack on the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip targeted the home of a local television journalist, Mohammed Khalifa, killing him and at least 14 other people. In this context, a threat emerged from Iran: if the US and its allies “continued to commit crimes” in Gaza, “Israel’s supporters should soon expect the closure of the Mediterranean Sea, the Strait of Gibraltar and the rest of the waterways” , said deputy commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Reza Naghdim, without explaining how such closure would be achieved. Iran does not ignore the Mediterranean Sea and it is not clear how the Revolutionary Guards can close it, but Naghdi spoke of “the birth of new resistance forces”, stressing that the Red Sea “has turned into a nightmare for Israel and its United States ”. “.

Meanwhile, the IDF, that is, the Israeli army, reported that in an attack on Rafah they had killed Hassan al-Atrash, responsible for supplying and producing weapons for Hamas, as well as for smuggling weapons from several countries to the Gaza Strip. and in the West Bank. It added that it had arrested more than 200 Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants last week and brought them to Israel for interrogation, a statement that came after Palestinian reports of large-scale attacks on teenagers and men in homes, shelters and hospitals in northern Israel. country. Gaza. The Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, stated that “due to the bombings” by Israel “they lost contact with the group responsible for five Israeli hostages” and added that they suspect that the prisoners were killed in one of the attacks: they provided the names of three of the hostages – Haim Gershon Peri, Yoram Etak Metzger and Amiram Israel Cooper; appeared in a video released by the Al-Qassam Brigades on December 18th with the title “Don’t let us grow old here”, in which the hostages asked their families and the Israeli government not to abandon them.