nbcnews.com
Alongside its fight with Hamas, Israel is fighting another battle: to convince the world, and chiefly the United States, that this is a just war. Israel’s public-relations machine has gone into overdrive in recent weeks to make the case that its pummeling of Gaza has been necessary and conducted in a way meant to minimize civilian deaths. It has allowed journalists, including those from NBC News, to embed with its soldiers in Gaza, maintained a steady drumbeat of social media posts, and made Isr…
2 months ago
nbcnews.com
TEL AVIV — Israel’s ferocious bombardment of the Gaza Strip will create an incubator for a new generation of terrorists, some extremism experts say, as thousands of young people who have lost families and homes risk being radicalized by the war and its likely chaotic aftermath. Israel says it wants to destroy Hamas, the terrorist group that carried out the massacre of more than 1,400 people and the kidnappings of 240 others on Oct. 7, according to official estimates. But Israel’s retaliatory bom…
3 months ago
nbcnews.com
TEL AVIV — The Israeli military is thrusting deeper into the Gaza Strip in a ground assault that has encircled the Palestinian enclave’s biggest city and cut off the main roads connecting its north and south, Israeli officials and Western military analysts said. The campaign has been shrouded in mystery, with growing numbers of Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers reported dead, but without a clear, publicly stated plan from Israel about how this campaign might end — or, in fact, a statement that…
3 months ago
nbcnews.com
TEKOA, West Bank — Half an hour before Eisa Jebril was killed, his mother, Samiha, was rolling him stuffed grape leaves. It was a dish he loved, but one she would never make for him again — the next time she saw him, he had been shot through the head, her family said, by an Israeli settler dressed as a soldier. “I was there with him. I carried him. He was dead on the spot,” his brother Murad, 35, told NBC News on Wednesday in the living room of their neat hillside home in the occupied West Bank…
3 months ago
nbcnews.com
TEL AVIV — Across the street from the Israeli Ministry of Defense, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was telling the nation in a speech to prepare for a long and hard war in the Gaza Strip, the chanting was loud, relentless and urgent. At a demonstration near the ministry’s imposing tower Saturday, two people with megaphones repeated “Bring them home now!” for at least 20 minutes. A hundreds-strong crowd echoed, “Now!” As Israel intensifies its ground operation against Hamas and bombards G…
3 months ago
nbcnews.com
HAIFA, Israel — While concern over the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip mounts, another undercurrent of alarm is growing in Washington and other Western capitals: Israel’s bombardment could spread into a wider regional war — one involving regional superpower Iran or its proxy forces. On Sunday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said on X that Israel had “crossed the red lines, which may force everyone to take action.” Many experts believe there is little desire in Washington and Tehran for a…
3 months ago
nbcnews.com
KIBBUTZIM RE’IM/BE’ERI, Israel — The tractors that recently dug graves are being prepared to farm again. Three weeks after the unprecedented Hamas attack in which residents of kibbutzim were tortured and butchered, some survivors are returning in an attempt to rebuild. Their ability to do so forms a question mark hanging over one of Israel’s foundational movements and whether these collective, often-leftist communities that were central to the establishment of the Jewish state can ever truly rec…
3 months ago
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JAFFA, Israel — Up a narrow, stone stairwell in this ancient port city, a group of self-confessed radicals plot an evening of interfaith rebellion. In a sea of hardening views and violent rhetoric after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, this small but growing band have formed an unofficial civil guard, an attempt to prevent the type of urban unrest that has accompanied previous rounds of conflict between Israel and militants in Gaza. Their mostly leftist movement is a fringe one, a relative speck of coop…
3 months ago
nbcnews.com
TEL AVIV — A difficult and bloody ground assault on the Gaza Strip is still likely in the coming days, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has told NBC News, despite mounting fury in the Arab world over a deadly hospital blast that has intensified fears of broader escalation in the region. Barak — who, having been defense minister during the country’s largest Gaza ground incursion in 2009, has rare experience of such an operation — said that if the conflict spreads it could spark a wider wa…
3 months ago
nbcnews.com
TEL AVIV — The U.S. has assessed that the deadly blast at a Gaza hospital Tuesday was most likely caused by a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, according to two U.S. officials and a congressional staffer. The group has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. NBC News consulted four military and munitions experts. One agreed with the U.S. assessment, which President Joe Biden hinted at during his trip to Israel on Wednesday. Three agreed the blast wasn’t from Israel. Th…
3 months ago
nbcnews.com
For 16 years, a blockade has throttled the Gaza Strip, worsening a humanitarian crisis in this overcrowded, impoverished enclave that Human Rights Watch calls an “open air prison.” On Monday, in response to the large-scale deadly attacks by Hamas, Israel announced this blockade would become what they call a full-scale “siege” — allowing no food, water, electricity or fuel to its 2.3 million residents, half of them children. Israel has also started intensively bombing Gaza. Laila el-Haddad, 45, a…
4 months ago
