Jerusalem — Six Israeli prisoners were killed and their bodies were found in a tunnel in Gaza over the weekend. On Wednesday, anger at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was still growing as violence continued in the Gaza Strip.
Tens of thousands of Israelis, who are getting more and more frantic, demanded that Netanyahu agree to a cease-fire deal with Hamas so that the last 101 prisoners could be brought back home. This was the third night in a row of large protests against Israel’s longtime leader. It is thought that about 75 of the hostages are still living.
On Tuesday night, protester Yair Katz yelled at CBS News, “The man lies all the time.” “He’s a crook and a liar, and he’s a criminal.”
NOTE: There is a picture of a dead child in this story that some people may find upsetting.
Katz, like many other Israelis, thinks Netanyahu is putting his political career ahead of the hostages because his fragile coalition government with far-right parties that don’t want a cease-fire with Hamas depends on it.
Protesters have said they will keep holding rallies until Netanyahu agrees to a cease-fire and a deal to free the hostages. However, the experienced politician has been defiant so far. In a speech to his country on Monday night, he said he would not “give in to pressure.”
Netanyahu won’t agree to any deal that calls for Israeli troops to leave the Philadelphi Corridor, a small area of land on the southern border of Gaza with Egypt. He says that Israel needs to keep troops there to stop Hamas from re-arming itself through tunnels that cross the border. Both Egypt and Hamas deny that things are moving through these tunnels.
Both Egypt and Hamas want Israel to leave the corridor completely. Hamas says it agreed to an earlier cease-fire proposal that included this condition, which was backed by President Biden, but Netanyahu then changed his mind.
The US blames top Hamas leaders for the deaths of American citizens in Israel.
There were different reports on Wednesday about how flexible Netanyahu’s government might be willing to be on this issue during the ongoing talks. Some said it could be part of a second phase of a cease-fire deal, while others said the prime minister was not willing to bend.
Benny Gantz, who used to be Israel’s defense minister, told the media on Tuesday night that the Philadelphi Corridor was not a “existential threat” to the country and should not get in the way of a deal to free the hostages.
Netanyahu gets a lot of criticism from Gantz, but this wasn’t the first time that top Israeli military leaders, both past and present, seemed to disagree with the prime minister.
It was clear on Wednesday that the war will not end until Netanyahu changes his mind.
The UN is working quickly to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza against a polio outbreak. As part of this emergency vaccination campaign, Israel agreed to a series of short military stops. At the same time, Israeli forces have continued to attack several areas in the devastated Palestinian territory.
In the past few days, strikes have happened in mostly safe areas of Gaza, like the area around the cities of Deir al-Balah and Gaza City. Tela Abu Ajwan, nine years old, was killed by shrapnel from an Israeli airstrike in the enclave’s once-bustling main city on Tuesday.
She was still on her pink rollerblades when the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City said she was dead.
Her family showed shots of her before the war. They showed a happy little girl whose life was cut short while she was playing with her friends. Medics in the area said she was one of nine people killed when Israeli missiles hit a house in Gaza City next to a park.
CBS News has asked the Israeli forces to say what they think the attack was aimed at.
Tuesday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement that a separate strike had hit a Hamas “command and control center” in a building in Gaza City. This center was being used “to direct and carry out terror attacks against IDF troops and the State of Israel.” This statement was similar to others that the IDF has issued since the war began.
“Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance and additional intelligence,” the IDF said, repeating its frequent claim that Hamas “systematically violates international law and operates from within civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.”
It broke Ajwan’s mother’s heart. She is one of the families of the almost 41,000 Palestinians killed since the war started, according to health officials in the Hamas-run area, who don’t make a distinction between civilian and combatant deaths.
Hamas’s first-ever terrorist attack on Israel on October 7 killed about 1,200 people and held about 250 others hostage. This set off the Gaza war. In November, there was a brief cease-fire, and many of those prisoners were freed in a swap of prisoners.
After almost 11 months of brutal violence and an agonizing hostage situation that won’t end, the Biden administration says it’s working on a new plan to end the war by calling for a cease-fire and the release of all hostages.