Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on Wednesday, said Netanyahu in a statement, amid the Gaza ceasefire and a regional diplomatic push.
Israeli troops would remain in the Palestinians’ Jenin refugee camp once the large-scale raid they launched last week was complete, said Defence Minister Israel Katz on Wednesday as a crackdown in the occupied West Bank extended into a second week.
The joy of thousands of Palestinian families who made it back home in north Gaza after a ceasefire with Israel is turning to despair as the cold reality of uninhabitable, bombed-out homes and dire shortages of basic supplies sets in.
Trump’s envoy meets Netanyahu, visits Gaza
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on Wednesday, said Netanyahu in a statement, amid the Gaza ceasefire and a regional diplomatic push.
Israeli media said Witkoff also visited Gaza on Wednesday to oversee the implementation of the ceasefire there, which US President Donald Trump hopes to leverage into a broader regional accord that would include Saudi Arabia and Israel formalising diplomatic ties.
The US official visited Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.
Netanyahu has long eyed ties with Riyadh and is due to meet Trump in Washington on 4 February, when talks for the next phase of the three-stage Gaza ceasefire are meant to formally start.
An Israeli government spokesperson declined to provide any details on Witkoff’s visit to Gaza, which Israel’s public broadcaster Kan said included an inspection of the Netzarim corridor.
Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have crossed over the route which cuts through Gaza east to west, as they returned to their homes in the northern part of the enclave.
Israel began pulling out of the corridor on Monday and has allowed civilians to return to homes in the north as part of the first six-week phase of the ceasefire, which will also see 33 hostages freed in exchange for almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
Seven hostages have already been released since the ceasefire took effect on 19 January. Three more, including a civilian woman and an elderly man, as well as a female soldier, will be released on Thursday, according to Netanyahu’s office.
Israel will free 110 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, according to the Palestinian prisoners’ information office, including 30 minors and 32 prisoners serving life sentences.
Five Thai citizens abducted from Israel during Hamas’ 7 October 2023 attack that sparked the Gaza conflict may also be released on Thursday, according to an Israeli official. Some 90 hostages presently remain in Gaza, according to Israeli authorities, 10 of them foreign nationals.
The second stage of the deal, if it is agreed in the negotiations, is meant to open the way to ending the war with the release of all hostages and a full Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza.
Gaza is one of the territories which the Palestinians seek for an independent state. Saudi Arabia has conditioned formal ties with Israel on Palestinian statehood and is unlikely to make progress on this front if the war in Gaza resumes.
In Saudi Arabia, Witkoff also met with Palestinian officials, according to a Palestinian source who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Israeli troops to remain in Jenin refugee camp, says defence minister
Israeli troops would remain in the Palestinians’ Jenin refugee camp once the large-scale raid they launched last week was complete, said Defence Minister Israel Katz on Wednesday as a crackdown in the occupied West Bank extended into a second week.
Hundreds of Israeli troops backed by helicopters, drones and armoured vehicles have been fighting sporadic gunbattles with Palestinian militants while carrying out searches in the streets and alleyways for weapons and equipment.
“The Jenin refugee camp will not be what it was,” said Katz during a visit to the refugee camp. “After the operation is completed, IDF forces will remain in the camp to ensure that terrorism does not return.”
He did not give details and a military spokesperson declined to comment.
The Palestinian foreign ministry condemned what it called Katz’s “provocative” statement and called for international pressure on Israel to stop the operation, which has already been condemned by countries including France and Jordan.
Israeli forces went into Jenin immediately after the start of a six-week ceasefire in Gaza, saying it aimed to hit militant groups including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both of which receive support from Iran.
At least 17 Palestinians, including six members of armed militant groups and a two-year-old girl, have been killed in Jenin and the surrounding villages during the operation, according to Palestinian officials.
The military said forces had killed at least 18 militants and detained 60 wanted individuals, dismantling over 100 explosive devices and seizing a weapons manufacturing workshop.
Within the camp, dozens of houses have been demolished and roads have been dug up by special armoured bulldozers, driving thousands of people from their homes. Water has been cut and Palestinian officials say at least 80% of the camp’s inhabitants have been forced to leave their homes.
“It’s terrifying, the explosions the fires, the houses which were demolished,” said Intisar Amalka, a displaced camp resident who said her nephew’s car had been destroyed by an Israeli bulldozer.
The Jenin refugee camp, a crowded township built for descendants of Palestinians who fled their homes or were driven out in the 1948 Middle East war around the creation of the state of Israel, has been a centre of militant activity for decades and the target of repeated raids by Israeli troops.
Just before the latest raid, security forces of the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited governance in parts of the West Bank, conducted a weekslong operation of its own in a bid to reassert control in Jenin.
As the fighting in Gaza has subsided, at least for the moment, Israeli forces have stepped up operations across the area, setting up checkpoints and roadblocks which have made travelling even short distances between towns and villages an hourslong trial for Palestinians.
Elsewhere in the northern West Bank, Israeli forces have been carrying out an operation in Tulkarm, another volatile city where they have clashed repeatedly with militants recently, moving into the city itself as well as into its refugee camp.
The West Bank, a kidney-shaped stretch of land about 100km long, was seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and is seen by Palestinians as the core of a future independent state, along with Gaza.
It has seen a surge in violence since the start of the war in Gaza in which hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, many of them gunmen but also including stone-throwing youths or uninvolved civilians, and thousands have been arrested.
Palestinian attacks in the West Bank and Israel have also killed dozens of Israelis.
Joy turns to despair as Gaza returnees struggle to settle in enclave’s north
The joy of thousands of Palestinian families who made it back home in north Gaza after a ceasefire with Israel is turning to despair as the cold reality of uninhabitable, bombed-out homes and dire shortages of basic supplies sets in.
Many have begun complaining about a lack of running water that forces them to queue for hours to fill plastic containers for drinking or cleaning. With most homes now heaps of rubble as far as the eye can see, returnees have scoured whatever useful items remain from their property to erect makeshift tents.
At night, residential districts laid to waste by Israeli airstrikes and shelling sink into darkness for lack of electricity or fuel to operate standby generators.
“There is nothing, no life, no water, no food, no drink, nothing for living. Life is very, very hard. There is no Jabalia camp,” said Hisham El-Err on Wednesday, standing by the ruins of his multistorey house in the biggest and most densely populated of the Gaza Strip’s eight historic refugee camps.
His extended family is now huddling in tents, which offer scant protection from Gaza’s mid-winter chill.
By late on Tuesday, Gaza’s Hamas authorities said most of the 650,000 people displaced from the north by the war had re-entered Gaza City and the north edge of the enclave from areas to the south where fighting was less intense and destructive.
Fahad Abu Jalhoum returned with his family to Jabalia from the Al Mawasi area in south Gaza but the destruction they found was so pervasive they had been forced to go back south.
“It’s just ghosts without souls [in the north],” Abu Jalhoum told Reuters back in Al Mawasi. “We all missed the north but when I went there I was shocked. So I returned to [the south] until we get relief from God.”
A Hamas official who spoke on condition of anonymity said smaller amounts of fuel, cooking gas and tents had been brought into Gaza than what had been agreed in ceasefire negotiations, which Israel strongly denied.
The Hamas-run Gaza government media office put the initial need for tents at 135,000, but the Hamas official said only around 2,000 had got in since the deal took effect on 19 January.
He also said work to rehabilitate hospitals and bakeries knocked out by the fighting had not begun and urged mediators to ensure more aid flows in, adding that dissatisfaction among militant groups could affect the truce.
A spokesperson for Cogat, the Israeli defence agency that liaises with the Palestinians, said that tens of thousands of tents had entered Gaza since the ceasefire and that gas and fuel were being delivered daily, in keeping with agreements.
Sisi says Egypt will not take part in ‘act of injustice’ displacing Palestinians
Egypt would not participate in the displacement of Palestinians, an “act of injustice” that would threaten Egyptian security, said President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi on Wednesday in his first public response to Trump’s call for Cairo to take in residents of the Gaza Strip.
Speaking at a press conference with visiting Kenyan President William Ruto, Sisi said Egypt would work with Trump to reach peace between Israel and Palestinians based on a two-state solution.
“Regarding what is being said about the displacement of Palestinians, it can never be tolerated or allowed because of its impact on Egyptian national security,” said Sisi.
“The deportation or displacement of the Palestinian people is an injustice in which we cannot participate.”
Trump said on Saturday that Egypt and Jordan should take in Palestinians from Gaza, which he called a “demolition site” following 15 months of Israeli bombardment that made most of its 2.3 million people homeless.
Israeli drone strike injures five in southern Lebanon
Five people were injured in an Israeli drone strike targeting the southern Lebanese town of Majdal Selm on Wednesday, said the Lebanese health ministry.
On Tuesday, Israeli airstrikes injured 36 people in Nabatieh, a major town in south Lebanon, according to the health ministry. The Israeli military said it had struck Hezbollah vehicles that were transporting weapons on the edge of Nabatieh.
The Israeli army also detained three people on Wednesday in the southern border town of Maroun al-Ras, Lebanese state news agency NNA reported.
Israel has carried out strikes in southern Lebanon although Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel agreed on a ceasefire in late November, ending a conflict that killed thousands of people since it was ignited by the Gaza war in 2023.
Israel has not yet fully withdrawn its forces from southern Lebanon and has said it will keep operating against any threat posed to the state of Israel and its citizens.
Following the strikes on Nabatieh, senior Hezbollah official Mohammad Raad said that the Lebanese people’s right to resist Israeli attacks was a “sacred and legitimate right”.
He said this right should be exercised at the time and place deemed necessary to protect the country’s security.
Turkey’s Erdoğan meets with Hamas leader in Ankara
Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan met with Hamas leader Muhammad Ismail Darwish in Ankara on Wednesday, said Erdogan’s office in a statement.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and Intelligence Chief Ibrahim Kalin also attended the meeting, as well as other Hamas officials.
Israeli airstrike kills three Turks attempting to cross from Lebanon to Israel
An Israeli airstrike killed three Turkish citizens who attempted to cross illegally from Lebanon to Israel, said Turkey’s foreign ministry on Wednesday.
“We condemn in the strongest terms this unlawful attack that resulted in the death of our citizens,” the ministry said in a statement, without mentioning when the incident took place.
Procedures were under way to repatriate their bodies to Turkey, said the ministry.
“As we have emphasised on every occasion, Israel must immediately end its aggressive policies that disregard human life and escalate tensions in our region,” said the ministry.
Trump administration to cancel student visas of pro-Palestinian protesters
Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday to combat anti-Semitism and pledged to deport non-citizen college students and others who took part in pro-Palestinian protests, said a White House official.
A fact sheet on the order promised “immediate action” by the Justice Department to prosecute “terroristic threats, arson, vandalism and violence against American Jews” and marshal all federal resources to combat what it called “the explosion of anti-Semitism on our campuses and streets” since the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas.
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” said Trump in the fact sheet.
“I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathisers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
The Hamas attacks and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza led to several months of pro-Palestinian protests that roiled US college campuses, with civil rights groups documenting rising anti-Semitic, anti-Arab and Islamophobic incidents.
Many pro-Palestinian protesters denied supporting Hamas or engaging in anti-Semitic acts, and said they were demonstrating against Israel’s military assault on Gaza, where health authorities say more than 47,000 people have been killed.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a large Muslim advocacy group, accused the Trump administration of an assault on “free speech and Palestinian humanity under the guise of combating anti-Semitism”, and described Wednesday’s order as “dishonest, overbroad and unenforceable”. DM
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