Antony Blinken set to leave Israel after meeting Benjamin Netanyahu, who says he is seeking to free a ‘maximum number’ of living hostages in Gaza
The bodies of two hostages were returned from the Gaza Strip, the communal farm they lived on announced Tuesday, The Associated Press reports,
Kibbutz Nirim said that the bodies of Yagev Buchshtav and Nadav Popplewell had been returned to Israel from the Gaza Strip overnight. The kibbutz did not provide additional information and the Israeli military did not immediately confirm the information.
Israel media reported that the two men — along with Avraham Munder, whose death his kibbutz announced Tuesday — were part of a larger military hostage extraction operation overnight.
Popplewell was declared dead by the Israeli military in June. Hamas said in May that Popplewell had died after being wounded in an Israeli airstrike. Israel’s military announced Buchshtav’s death in July.
The men were taken hostage by militants on Oct. 7, who stormed the border killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking roughly 250 hostages. About 110 hostages kidnapped that day remain in the strip. About a third of them are believed to be dead,AP reports.
The US secretary of state has said during a visit to Israel that the current round of ceasefire talks is “maybe the last opportunity” to broker a truce and a hostage and prisoner swap in the 10-month-old war in Gaza. Blinken met Israeli officials, including in a three-hour one-on-one with the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Monday during a 24-hour trip to Tel Aviv before he travels on to Egypt.
Netanyahu’s three-hour meeting with Blinken was “positive and conducted in a good spirit”, according to a statement from the Israeli prime minister’s office.
The Israeli army said Monday that one of its soldiers was killed in the country’s north, where cross-border fire with Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has soared during the Gaza war.
Israel struck Hezbollah weapons depots on Monday deep in Lebanon’s east, a source close to the group told Agence France-Presse. The source close to Iran-backed Hezbollah said “Israeli strikes in the (eastern) Bekaa region targeted Hezbollah weapons depots,” requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA) said three locations in Lebanon’s east witnessed “enemy Israeli raids this evening”. Lebanon’s health ministry said the strikes in east Lebanon “injured eight people, including six Lebanese citizens, a five-year-old Syrian girl, and a fifteen-year-old Syrian girl”.
The armed wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility on Monday for a bomb blast near a synagogue in Tel Aviv that Israeli police and the Shin Bet intelligence agency described as a terrorist attack.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza has said there have now been 40,139 Palestinians killed and 92,743 injured in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October.
Israel is “flagrantly and regularly” committing war crimes in Gaza, according to a former British diplomat who recently resigned over ministers’ failure to ban arms sales to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Mark Smith, who resigned as a counter-terrorism official at the British embassy in Dublin after raising complaints about the sale of British weapons to Israel, told the BBC on Monday that he believed Israel to be in breach of international law.
Claims of Palestinians being tortured, left untreated in hospital and unable to escape constant bombardment have been submitted to the high court in London by lawyers seeking an order preventing the UK government continuing to grant arms export licences to British companies selling arms to Israel.
Blinken said on Monday that the US and Israel were working towards a plan to vaccinate Palestinians in Gaza for polio after the besieged territory reported its first case of the disease in 25 years. “We’re working with the Israeli government on that, and I believe that we’ll be able to move forward with a plan to do that in the coming weeks,” Blinken told reporters in Tel Aviv, reports AFP.
