Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu held a telephone conversation in which they discussed developments in the war in Gaza. The phone call between the two, reported by the White House, came the day after the adoption of the UN Security Council resolution that called for more aid to civilians in the Gaza Strip but did not call for a ceasefire, a resolution with the United States abstaining States and Russia were accepted. And it came on the day that the Wall Street Journal published a reconstruction about Biden and Netanyahu: According to the newspaper, which cites well-informed sources, the attack took place a few days after the Hamas attack on October 7th in southern Israel On October 11, the US president persuaded the Israeli prime minister to stop a preemptive strike against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, warning him that the attack could trigger a larger regional war. The US newspaper's reconstruction was quickly denied by Netanyahu's office, which called the article “false.”
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According to the WSJ, Israeli warplanes were in the air awaiting orders when Biden spoke to Netanyahu and urged him to consider 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 multi-pronged attack,” the WSJ reports. But Netanyahu's office announced that “Prime Minister Netanyahu had already decided on the first day of the war that Israel would first work toward a decisive victory in the south (Gaza ed.) while preventing an attack in the north (Lebanon (ed.). )” and that “this policy was adopted by the War Cabinet”.
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In the hours after the UN Council meeting, new Israeli attacks on Gaza continued: 76 Palestinians, all members of the same extended family, were killed in an airstrike on a building in Gaza City on Friday evening. The Strip's civil protection agency, which reported on the incident, said that women and children were among the victims. While an attack on the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza struck the home of local television journalist Mohammed Khalifa, killing him and at least 14 other people. In this context, a threat came from Iran: if the US and its allies “continue to commit crimes” in Gaza, “Israel's supporters should soon expect the closure of the Mediterranean, the Strait of Gibraltar and the remaining waterways,” said the deputy commander the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Mohammad Reza Naghdim, without explaining how such a closure would be achieved. Iran has no view of the Mediterranean and it is not clear how the Revolutionary Guards can close it, but Naghdi spoke of the “birth of new resistance forces” and stressed that the Red Sea “has become a nightmare for Israel and its United States “. “.
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Meanwhile, the IDF, the Israeli army, reported that in a raid on Rafah, it killed Hassan al-Atrash, responsible for supplying and producing weapons for Hamas as well as for smuggling weapons from various countries to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It added that it had arrested more than 200 Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters in the past week and taken them to Israel for interrogation. This statement came after Palestinian reports of large-scale raids on teenagers and men at homes, shelters and hospitals in northern Gaza. The Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas' armed wing, said it had “lost contact with the group responsible for five Israeli hostages” “due to the bombings” by Israel, adding that they suspect that the prisoners were killed in one of the raids: They revealed the names of three of the hostages – Haim Gershon Peri, Yoram Etak Metzger and Amiram Israel Cooper; They appeared in a video released by the Al-Qassam Brigades on December 18 titled “Let's not grow old here,” in which the hostages called on their families and the Israeli government not to abandon them .