Israel-Hamas War: What happened on day 129?

An Israeli government spokesperson said on Monday that Hamas had been reduced to half its fighting force in the Gaza war, with more than 12,000 gunmen who have been killed and large numbers wounded or captured.

"We're talking about three-quarters of Hamas' battalions that have been shattered ... with over 12,000 terrorists who have been killed," Eylon Levy said in a briefing.

"When you take into account the number of terrorists who have been wounded or apprehended, that is more than half of Hamas' fighting force knocked out of action."

The United States is working on a hostage deal between Israel and Hamas that would lead to a period of calm in Gaza lasting for at least six weeks, President Joe Biden said on Monday.

"We're actively working for peace, security and dignity for both the Palestinian people and the Israeli people. And I'm working on this day and night," Biden told reporters after talks with Jordanian King Abdullah.

Mossad Head David Barnea, Shin Bet Director Ronan Bar, and IDF Lt.-Gen. Nitzan Alon will leave on Tuesday for a meeting in Cairo with CIA Director William J. Burns, Egyptian Intelligence Director Abbas Kamel, and the Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman Al-Thani, Maariv reported on Monday citing a senior Israeli official.

During the meeting, they will discuss efforts to free more hostages from Hamas captivity. 

Britain's opposition Labour Party has withdrawn support for its candidate to become a member of parliament in a special election after he was recorded espousing conspiracy theories about Israel.

Labour announced it had withdrawn support for Azhar Ali, its by-election candidate for Rochdale in northern England, after he suggested Israel had relaxed its security in run up to the attack by Hamas last year to provide grounds to invade Gaza.

IDF fighter jets attacked a number of infrastructures in southern Lebanon on Monday belonging to the Hezbollah terror organization.

Infrastructure struck included those in the Tallousa and Blida regions. An observation post in the Khiam region in south Lebanon was also struck.

This is a developing story.

The White House welcomed the Israeli hostage raid that brought two captives home, and criticized the Palestinian casualties from the raid, amid tensions between the American and Israeli leaders, with NBC reporting that US President Joe Biden had, in private conversation with donors, called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an “a****le.”

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius blamed the tension on differences of opinion over how best to reach a deal to release the 136 hostages held by Hamas, in an interview with MSNBC on Monday.

The White House on Monday pressed Israel to work toward a pause in the Gaza conflict to win freedom for more hostages held by Hamas and rapidly increase the flow of humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians.

John Kirby, the White House national security spokesperson, told reporters that some progress had been made in negotiations toward a humanitarian pause but that more work remained to be done.

"We continue to support an extended humanitarian pause," Kirby said.

He spoke a day after US President Joe Biden spoke by phone to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and told him a military operation in Rafah "should not proceed" without a plan to protect civilians there.

Kirby welcomed news that the Israeli military had freed two hostages during a raid by special forces in Gaza's southern Rafah neighborhood.

He said there can be no end to the Gaza crisis until Hamas releases all hostages.

The US State Department on Monday said that it is not Washington's assessment that Israeli airstrikes in Rafah are the launch of a full-scale offensive in the area, where people have been sheltering with the rest of the enclave in ruins and nowhere left to run.

US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters that without a credible plan that Israel can execute, Washington would not support a full-scale military operation in Rafah going ahead, adding that he does not think cutting US aid to Israel would be a more impactful step than what Washington has done so far.

The IDF plans to produce an interim report of sorts on its alleged war crimes probes of its soldiers in late March-early April, The Jerusalem Post has learned. The decision to produce such an interim report was split into two stages.

At the first stage earlier in January, as the hearing on genocide before the International Court of Justice unfolded, top IDF legal officials decided it was important to map out the status of the operational probes relating to alleged war crimes. Part of this process included vetting the files for cases that involved higher numbers of alleged civilian casualties or which had received greater media attention, such as incidents in which the IDF allegedly mistakenly killed journalists in Lebanon with no suspected terror ties.

Another part of the process involved categorizing files by how far along the initial probes were as well as how quickly they might be able to be advanced toward arriving at initial decisions or at least in-depth public updates. However, at this stage, this process was only carried out so that top IDF legal officials would have the lay of the land of the IDF’s and Israel’s potential exposure and of how quickly some kind of an interim report might be rolled out, should the need arise.

Uncertainty with the ICJ

The IDF legal division and Israel still did not know how the ICJ would rule, and it was thought prudent to be prepared with additional information should any quick additional action be required once the ICJ issued its decision. On January 26, the ICJ on the one hand declined to order the IDF to cease the war or to withdraw from Gaza, but on the other hand, issued a series of warnings to Israel about the implications of its conduct of the war and ordered an update be delivered to the court around February 26.

Shortly after that decision, the IDF legal division decided to proceed with the interim report. The idea and purpose of the interim report will be to provide initial review decisions or in-depth updates on some portions of the dozens of high-profile cases that are being given priority to arrive at results much sooner than the wider massive number of files.

Israeli soldiers operate in the Gaza Strip, February 8, 2024 (credit: REUTERS/DYLAN MARTINEZ)

Part of the problem is that if after the 2014 Gaza conflict, the IDF performed 500 initial probes and 32 full criminal probes, the scope of the current war so dwarfs that conflict, that the IDF is expected to have to perform many thousands or more initial reviews to decide how many criminal probes are necessary. While some IDF probes from 2014 had initial results within weeks or months of the end of the 50-day war, some took as long as four years.

TAKING INTO account the much larger number of initial reviews that will need to be performed this time, the IDF has increased its staff dedicated to the task. However, even with increased staff, the IDF legal division understood that it could not delay reporting to the ICJ and allies like the US beyond a certain point.

Moving forward with an interim report on select high-profile cases was a move designed to address concerns about progress and transparency in war crimes probes. If the initial decision were made with the ICJ in mind, this decision took on new significance after the US announcement last week that Israel would have 45 days, until around March 23, to file a report on its war crimes probes and compliance with international law, should it want US arms to continue to flow to it.

Whatever the IDF legal division may produce in late March or April, there will probably be a fuller, but still express interim report some months later, before a large number of the cases reach decisions at the initial level. All this may only be at the initial review level, which leads to a recommendation by top operational commanders to IDF Military Advocate General (MAG) Maj.-Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi about whether to open a fuller criminal probe.

Tomer-Yerushalmi can then take longer to analyze the legal issues involved and instruct the IDF investigators to gather supplemental evidence. There may also be a small number of cases where the suspicion against the soldier was so high that a file immediately moved into being a criminal probe.

For the early months of the war, the IDF legal division and Justice Ministry believed there was no basis to issue even an interim report because too much of the largest stages of the war still had not taken place. They were holding off just trying to keep up with the potential files that had already come in.

Also, despite US and human rights pressure to issue reports sooner, there is heavy domestic pressure against being seen as undermining IDF combat soldiers while many of them are still regularly dying as they try to defeat Hamas and return the Israeli hostages. The IDF legal division says it will follow the Turkel Commission report time lines, but aspects of those time lines are amorphous, and again, some key reports from the 2014 conflict were only produced four years later.

It seems that the upcoming interim reports will only be the opening volley in a years-long struggle of reports that Israel will need to provide to the ICJ, the US, and others. 

International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan on Monday threatened Israel with harsher war crimes scrutiny if it invades Rafah.

In a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter, he wrote, "I am deeply concerned by the reported bombardment and potential ground incursion by Israeli forces in Rafah."  

The IDF's position is that it killed only or almost entirely Hamas terrorists during its operation early Monday morning to rescue two hostages, but Khan implied, like many global media reports have, that the IDF may have killed large numbers of Palestinian civilians. No official evidence has been presented to support such claims, but videos have surfaced on social media of children allegedly killed by Israeli airstrikes.
 
"My Office has an ongoing and active investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine. This is being taken forward as a matter of the utmost urgency, with a view to bringing to justice those responsible for Rome Statute crimes," Khan added.

A member of the Palestinian Civil Defence works at the site of Israeli strikes, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel Hamas, in Rafah, Gaza Strip February 12, 2024 (credit: Palestinian Civil Defence/Handout via REUTERS )

The rules of war

Further, he stated, "All wars have rules and the laws applicable to armed conflict cannot be interpreted so as to render them hollow or devoid of meaning. This has been my consistent message, including from Ramallah last year. Since that time, I have not seen any discernible change in conduct by Israel."

Though the US has complemented the IDF for changing its tactics at points to reduce collateral civilian harm, Us President Joe Biden has also criticized Israel for not doing enough in that area, and Khan clearly argued that the IDF has not adjusted enough since his warnings during his late November-early December visit to Israel and the West Bank.

"As I have repeatedly emphasized, those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my Office takes action pursuant to its mandate. To all those involved: my Office is actively investigating any crimes allegedly committed. Those who are in breach of the law will be held accountable," he said in a not-so-veiled threat to both the IDF and Hamas. 

Moreover, in addressing some of Hamas's specific ongoing war crimes, he said, "I also continue to call for the immediate release of all hostages. This also represents an important focus of our investigations."

Khan did not address the large amount of evidence Israel has produced of Hamas embedding itself within hospitals, mosques, and schools, or the large apparatus that the IDf has used to evacuate civilians from war zones.\

The IDF maintains that it follows international law to limit collateral harm to civilians, but that Hamas's tactics of using human shields makes some harm to civilians unavoidable.