Israel says it will receive bodies of four hostages held by Hamas in Gaza
Israeli security officials also said they were working to bring back six living hostages on Saturday.
The announcement came as relatives and supporters of those held hostage in Gaza marked 500 days of their captivity with the number 500 laid out on the beach in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Meanwhile, on Monday, Israeli army said it had killed Mohammad Shaheen, the head of operations in Lebanon for Hamas, in the port city of Sidon.
Hamas confirmed Mr Shaheen's death but described him as a military commander.
On Monday, Israeli forces also said they would remain in five strategic locations in southern Lebanon close to the border despite Tuesday's deadline for a full withdrawal.
Israel had originally agreed to withdraw all its forces from southern Lebanon under its ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah, but said on Monday any such move must be done "in a way that the security of our civilians is kept".
The initial withdrawal deadline was in late January, but Lebanon agreed to extend it to 18 February.
Lebanese president Joseph Aoun said the ceasefire agreement "must be respected," claiming Israel "cannot be trusted".
He said Lebanese officials were "working diplomatically to achieve the complete Israeli withdrawal, and I will not accept that a single Israeli remains on Lebanese territory".
Giving reasons behind the latest drone strike, Israel accused Mr Shaheen of "recently planning terror attacks, directed and funded by Iran, from Lebanese territory against the citizens of the state of Israel".
Footage showed a car engulfed in flames following the strike near a Lebanese army checkpoint and Sidon's municipal sports stadium.
Lebanon's state news agency said emergency teams had removed one body from the car, but did not identify the victim.
Since the ceasefire, Israel has continued air strikes in southern and eastern Lebanon, claiming it is targeting military sites containing missiles and combat equipment.
Israel and Lebanon have exchanged accusations of violating the ceasefire agreement.
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Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Hamas is using Israel's protests as a weapon of war
Israel is caught in a tragic paradox: the finest qualities that define its national character – its compassion, solidarity, and moral responsibility – are exploited by adversaries who recognise in these virtues not strength, but vulnerability. As over half a million Israelis joined a nationwide strike yesterday, demanding a ceasefire and the return of hostages from Gaza, it was impossible not to be moved by the depth of feeling, the urgency of the appeals, and the sheer moral weight of the demand. Yet what moves one side to tears hardens the heart of the other, moving them to ruthless calculation. The protests are genuine, justified, and born of unbearable grief, but to Hamas they are confirmation that its strategy is working. For nearly 700 days, hostages have languished in tunnels beneath Gaza, held by a group that has no humanitarian interest in their fate. The Israeli families who protest for their return are not protesting because they are weak, but because they care. That is the unbearable truth of the dilemma: love, in the hands of a cynical enemy, becomes a lever. And over and over again, when Israel shows signs of internal dissent, Hamas hardens its position. In November 2023, May 2024, and again in early 2025, the group escalated its demands or walked away from negotiations whenever it sensed either international pressure on Israel or domestic fracture within it. Each protest, each demonstration, is interpreted not as a plea to save the hostages but as a signal to Hamas that it need not concede. The more Israelis protest, the more its enemies are taught to take hostages in future. That this distortion exists is not a reason to suppress protest, but it is a reason to understand its consequences. In a different world, the moral clarity of the protesters would move international actors to increase pressure on Hamas. In our world, the images feed into a narrative of Israeli weakness, not Hamas culpability. The tragic result is that a natural democratic process becomes, in enemy hands, a psychological weapon. That is not the fault of the protesters. But it is a risk to be managed. The Israeli government, meanwhile, has failed to manage that risk. Rather than embracing hostage families with empathy and unity, key ministers chose alienation and suspicion. Netanyahu accused them of helping Hamas. Finance Minister Smotrich claimed they were 'burying hostages in tunnels'. The rhetoric has been vicious, contemptuous, and politically self-destructive. By treating desperate families as political enemies, the government abandoned its most basic duty: to bind the nation together in a time of war. In doing so, it squandered the moral high ground without gaining any strategic advantage. And yet, the government is not wrong about Hamas. Hamas has no intention of returning the hostages simply out of pity or moral appeal. It never did. Its entire logic is predicated on holding leverage, preserving its arsenal, and remaining in power. That is why the core dilemma remains unresolved: Hamas will not release the hostages unless it can claim victory. But releasing them on such terms would strengthen Hamas, vindicate 7 October, and endanger Israel's future. This is the trap. And it is a trap with no obvious exit. The government cannot simply acquiesce to protesters' demands, not because it is heartless, but because no act of goodwill or political will can unilaterally extract hostages from Hamas tunnels. Even the most far-reaching Israeli concessions would not guarantee the return of all those still held. At best, they would secure partial releases under conditions amounting to a political defeat. At worst, they would signal capitulation while yielding nothing. Everyone understands this, including, deep down, the protesters. The demonstrations are not naïve demands for the impossible. They are desperate expressions of anguish from a people that has no other way to cry out in public. To some extent, then, the protests are performative. Not in the sense of being disingenuous, but in the older sense of ritual: an enactment of grief, of outrage, of helpless love. They are how a free society resists despair. But they are also how it exposes itself. Protest in Israel is sacred. It is also, in this war, a signal, seen by the enemy not as a cry for justice, but as a confirmation of weakness. What is read internally as moral courage is interpreted externally as operational restraint. What is, domestically, a sign of vitality becomes, in the eyes of Hamas and its sympathisers, evidence of vulnerability. This dissonance is not a theoretical concern. Throughout the war, Arab media outlets, foremost among them Al Jazeera, have framed internal Israeli protests as proof that Hamas is winning. For them, every sign of dissent in Israel is not an indictment of Hamas's cruelty but a validation of its strategy. A democratic protest is presented as a referendum on defeat. Israel's soul-searching becomes, in translation, self-destruction. The tragedy is not that Israelis protest, but that their most authentic expressions of democratic anguish are perceived by their enemies as weapons of psychological warfare. And in that perception, those expressions do become weapons, though not the ones the protesters intend. That is why, amid the cries for release, a different voice has also emerged. The Tikvah Families Forum, a group of hostage families aligned more closely with the government, issued an open letter calling for national resilience, denouncing those who, in their view, weakened Israel's posture during war. Their message was not a dismissal of grief but a warning against its misdirection. In their eyes, strength lies not in protest but in perseverance. Their stance reflects a genuine moral and strategic fear: that the country's emotional power might become its strategic undoing. What remains is a performance of loyalty, anger, and love, enacted in the full knowledge that it may change little on the ground, but affirms something essential about who they are. But that affirmation comes at a cost. Hamas is watching. And the more it sees Israel in torment, the more it believes it can outlast, outmanoeuvre, and outbleed its enemy. To resist this requires not silence but awareness. Israel alone may not be able to escape this trap. The international community, so quick to find fault with Israel, should redirect its moral clarity toward those who hold civilians underground while demanding immunity above. Israel fights with its heart exposed. That is its glory – and its danger.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Gaza's journalists are talented, professional and dignified. That's why Israel targets them
The first time I met Al Jazeera's Gaza team lead, Tamer Almisshal, was in July last year. His team had already buried two journalists, Hamza al-Dahdouh and Samer Abu Daqqa. The rest, he told me, were hungry. They were also dealing with trying to get hold of protective gear, threats from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the killing of family members. Ismail al-Ghoul hadn't seen his wife and child in months and was missing them intensely. Hossam Shabat, Mohammed Qraiqea and Anas al-Sharif were asking for time to secure food in the morning before they could start reporting. Today, they are all dead. I spoke with various members of the Gaza team while writing a profile of Gaza's veteran reporter Wael al-Dahdouh, who lost his wife, three of his children and grandson. All spoke of their work as a duty that needed to be carried out despite the risks. Three members of that team have since been killed in a chain of assassinations. Each time I sent condolences, the response was always that the coverage would not cease. 'We are continuing,' the Gaza editor told me last week, after he lost his entire Gaza City team in the targeted strike that claimed the lives of Sharif, Mohammed Nofal, Ibrahim Thaher and Qraiqea. 'We will not betray their message, or their last wishes.' As these killings dazed the world – and the response to them became mired in unproven and in some cases risibly implausible claims that some of these journalists were militants – little has been said about the calibre of journalism in Gaza. How fluent, articulate and poised its journalists are under impossible circumstances. How much they manage to capture horrific events and pain on a daily basis, in a journalistic Arabic that they have perfected to an art, while maintaining a professional, collected presence on camera. How much they manage to keep their cool. I struggled often to translate their words into English, so rich and expansive is their expression. Even Sharif's final message, a text for the ages, loses some of its power in translation. In it, he addresses those who 'choked' our breath, but the word he uses is closer to 'besieged' – evoking not just physical asphyxiation but the silencing of a surveilled people's voice. What strikes me when I speak with journalists in and from Gaza is how evangelical and heartbreakingly idealistic they are; how much journalism to them was a duty even if it meant certain death. All who have been killed had a choice, and those who are still alive and reporting still do. Sharif said he had been threatened several times by Israeli authorities over the past two years. Al Jazeera told me that he was sent a warning by Israeli intelligence and told to stop reporting. When he refused, his father was killed in an airstrike. When Ghoul took over from Dahdouh early last year, Dahdouh told him that it was a dangerous job, and no one would fault him for leaving his post and returning to his wife and child. Ghoul refused, and was decapitated in a targeted strike. What the Israeli government is trying to do with these killings is not just stop the stream of damning reports and footage, but annihilate the very image of Palestinians that these media professionals convey. The credibility, dignity and talent that Gaza's journalists exhibit to the world in their reports and social media posts has to be extinguished. The more Gaza is a place that is teeming with militants, where there are no reliable narrators, and where Israel's justifications for killing and starvation cannot be challenged by plausible witnesses, the easier Israel can prosecute its genocidal campaign. A recent investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call identified the sinisterly named 'legitimisation cell', a unit of the Israeli military tasked, in the words of the report, with 'identifying Gaza-based journalists it could portray as undercover Hamas operatives, in an effort to blunt growing global outrage over Israel's killing of reporters'. According to the investigation's sources, the effort is 'driven by anger that Gaza-based reporters were 'smearing [Israel's] name in front of the world''. Central to this effort is Israel's ability to rely on western media to treat its claims as somehow plausible, despite the fact that time and time again, it has made claims that turn out not to be true. Emergency workers who were killed because they were 'advancing suspiciously', according to the IDF, were said to be found in restraints with execution-style shots. The claim that Hamas was systematically stealing aid, which is used to justify blockade and starvation, was contradicted by sources within the Israeli military itself. It is Hamas that is shooting Palestinians queueing for aid, Israel has said, not us. Eventually, this behaviour deserves to be called what it is: systemic deception that forfeits your right to be a credible authority. And still we are told that Israel has killed a journalist, but here is Israel's claim that the journalist was a militant. You can make up your mind. The resulting ambiguity means that even if these claims cannot be verified, they are imbued with potential truth. Do you see how that works? The truth is that journalists in Gaza have been colossally failed by many of their colleagues in the western media – not just in terms of how their killings are reported, but in how the entire conflict is described. Figures of the dead and starving in Gaza are often described as coming from 'Hamas-run' ministries, but you don't see the statements coming from Israeli authorities caveated as serially unreliable, or the phrase 'wanted by the international criminal court' attached to the name Benjamin Netanyahu. Meanwhile, the word of Palestinian journalists is never quite enough – not until foreign media (who are not allowed into Gaza) can give the final gold-standard judgment. They are cast out of the body of journalism, their truth buried along with them. In Gaza, however, there will always be someone brave and clear-eyed who continues the coverage. Who puts on a press flak jacket that makes them a target. They continue to bear, alone, the responsibility of bringing the world the reality of events in Gaza, even as their voices and breaths are besieged. Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
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