EXPLAINER

The Israeli army has killed at least 165 people in the last 24 hours as Netanyahu reiterates his opposition to a Palestinian state.

That’s what it says on Sunday, 21th January2024:

Latest developments

• A video confirmed by Al Jazeera showed that a fire had broken out in Gaza Jabalia refugee camp after an overnight Israeli attack in the area.
• Thousands of people gathered in central Tel Aviv on Saturday, demanding the return of Hamas prisoners and new elections to replace the Netanyahu government.
• The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is pushing for an investigation into allegations by pro-Palestinian students at Columbia University in New York that they were sprayed with a harmful “chemical agent.” during their protest on Friday.
• Tess Ingram, communications specialist at UNICEF, called on the world to put an immediate end to the “distorted version of normal” in Gaza in a video statement published on X on Saturday.
• Israel Defense Forces Leaflets dropped on Saturday in the southern Gaza Strip and suggested benefits for those who provide Israel with information about prisoners taken by Hamas on Oct. 7.

Human influence and struggle

• According to the Gaza Health Ministry, the Israeli army has been accused of carrying out several massacres of Palestinian families in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, killing at least 165 people.
• Israeli shelling on Saturday east of the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza killed four Palestinians According to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, 21 others were injured.
• The Syrian state press SANA said Israel had attacked one Buildings in Damascus on Saturday. Israel has neither claimed responsibility for the attack nor made any comment.
• Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi promised this strike back in Israel following the air strike on Syria after five members of the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were killed, state broadcaster IRIB reported on Saturday.
• The US military personnel attacked in an attack on Iraq’s Ain al-Assad air base on Saturday suffered “minor” injuries, Reuters news agency reported, citing an unnamed US official. A member of the Iraqi security forces was also injured in the attack.

diplomacy

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his opposition to the independent Palestinian state and rejected the Biden administration’s stance on the issue. “Full Israeli security control…is antithetical to a Palestinian state,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter.
• UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reiterated on Sunday that “the denial of the right to statehood to the Palestinian people” was “unacceptable”. “The right of the Palestinian people to build their own state must be recognized by all,” he posted on X.
• The US Office of Palestinian Affairs reported on Saturday called for an “urgent investigation” into the killing of 17-year-old Palestinian-American Tawfiq Ajaq in the occupied West Bank.
• San Francisco Mayor London Breed declined to veto a resolution from city officials calling for one extended ceasefire in Gaza said the measure would make their city “more angry, more divided and more unsafe.” Breed explained that her veto would send the matter back to the Board of Supervisors, in whom she has “no confidence.”
• At a foreign policy conference on Saturday, Britain’s Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy was interrupted during a speech by pro-Palestinian protesters and briefly left the podium, saying he wanted “change through power, not through protest.”
• Saudi Arabia’s Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud says the kingdom is “very concerned” about a “difficult and dangerous time in the region.” Tensions in the Red SeaReuters reported, citing a CNN interview that will air on Sunday.