Israel-Hamas war day 207: What's going on in Gaza, Lebanon?

Mosab Hassan Yousef, the disowned son of a Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored on Tuesday, where he defended his stance that a Rafah operation was essential for defeating Hamas. 

Yousef insisted that Israel should not compromise its security because of “global pressure,” as the pressure was only temporary.

“If we don’t end Hamas and remove them from power… we are going to have many other wars. This is not Hamas’s first attempt to take hostages and use civilians for human shields…We do not need to give Hamas one more opportunity to destabalize the region and create a major war like this,” Yousef stressed. 

Members of the Order 9 movement are protesting at the Allenby crossing on the Israeli-Jordanian border, Israeli media reported on Wednesday morning.

The cause of the protest is to halt hundreds of aid trucks purportedly departing from Jordan to Gaza.

Rocket sirens sounded in Rosh Hanikra and Shlomi in northern Israel on Tuesday night.

IDF reservists Ido Aviv and Kalkidan Mehari were killed on Saturday by a mistaken tank fire that targeted a building where IDF soldiers were present, a preliminary investigation by the IDF found on Tuesday.

Two other soldiers were injured in the incident.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday that he will take to Israel's leaders a list of measures they still need to take to increase the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, ahead of meetings in Israel on Wednesday.

Blinken, speaking to reporters at a warehouse of Jordan Hashemite Charity Organization where aid shipments from US-based charities are gathered, also said the first shipments of aid directly from Jordan to northern Gaza's Erez crossing would leave on Tuesday.

An Israeli offensive in Rafah is a bad idea and would not resolve anything in the country's fight against Hamas, France’s foreign minister told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, according to a French diplomatic source.

"It is a bad idea to do it. There are too many uncertainties over the humanitarian issues," Stephane Sejourne told Netanyahu during a meeting at the prime minister's office in Jerusalem, the source with direct knowledge of the conversation said.

This is not just a heartwarming picture. At a time when we see the madness on the college campuses in the United States and the world's hypocrisy regarding Hamas, it is also an important image: Four-year-old Abigail Idan in the arms of US President Biden.

"And here the child asks." It says in the Passover Haggadah, preceding “Ma Nishtana.” The children, the next generation, need to ask their parents questions. Their parents, in response, need to answer and explain to them the world, the reality, the optimistic story of Passover that has been giving hope for thousands of years, a story that reminds us that in the end, good triumphs over evil, and humanity prevails.

Pictured here is a little girl who has no parents to whom she can address her questions. Abigail's father, the photographer Roi Idan, and her mother, Smadar, were murdered on October 7 at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, and Abigail herself was kidnapped to Gaza.

The White House said it was unaware whether US officials were in contact with China, which said on Tuesday it had held talks between rival Palestinian groups, but that Washington would welcome any efforts by Beijing to bring stability to the region and get Hamas to accept a hostage deal.

The War Cabinet meeting planned for Tuesday evening was cancelled on Tuesday afternoon, according to Israeli media.

Prosecutors from the International Criminal Court have interviewed staff from Gaza's two biggest hospitals, two sources told Reuters, the first confirmation that ICC investigators were speaking to medics about possible crimes in the Gaza Strip.

The sources, who asked not to be identified due to the subject's sensitivity, told Reuters that ICC investigators had taken testimony from staff who had worked in the main hospital in Gaza City, Shifa, in the north of the enclave, and the main hospital in Khan Younis, Nasser, in the south.

The sources declined to provide more details, citing concerns about the safety of potential witnesses.