Israel-Hamas war updates: Children among dead as Israeli strike hits Rafah

Sofi Orr is only 17. She will be expected to enlist in the Israeli army in a few months.

But she’s made a decision not to join the army despite abuse and threats she’s been receiving.

While Israeli society has strongly shifted to the right since October 7, she says there can be no military solution to a political problem.

Watch our interview with Sofi Orr below:

Below is a recap of the day’s main developments:

• At least 20 Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli air attack on a residential building in Rafah.
• The Israeli war cabinet meeting on ‘post-war’ plans for Gaza has been cancelled after opposition from far-right ministers.
• Tel Aviv protest leader says only an end to occupation can bring security for Israel.
• The spokesman for the Qassam Brigades said there will be no hostage deal before a complete stop to the Israeli war.
• UN Human Rights office says settlers feel “emboldened” to carry out attacks in the occupied West Bank.

More than 8,663 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 7, according to the government media office, which added that thousands more are missing under the rubble amid relentless bombardment.

An overwhelming number of more than 21,000 people killed in the nearly three months of Israeli bombardment, which is the most destructive in recent history, have been civilians. Israel has repeatedly targeted schools, and even neonatal care centres have not been spared, resulting in the killing of newborn babies.

According to Save the Children data in early November, a child was being killed every 10 minutes. The UN has called the besieged Palestinian enclave “a graveyard” for children due to the high casualty figures.

Read more here.

Citing Syrian army and intelligence sources, Reuters has reported that Israeli strikes reported earlier were on a main Syrian air defence base.

The strikes were believed to have targeted the base, as well as a radar station, in the Tel al-Sahn area in the Sweida province of southwestern Syria, a Syrian military intelligence source and another regional security official familiar with the matter told the news agency.

Last month, another anti-aircraft defence system and radar station in Tel Qulaib and Tel Maseeh in southern Syria were hit in what the senior intelligence sources said was an intensified campaign by Israel to disrupt Syrian air defence systems that Iran was involved in expanding.

Israeli has repeatedly struck Syrian government positions since the beginning of the war, in what military experts have said appears to an effort to slowing Iran’s growing entrenchment in Syria.

Maria Marin, member of the Podemos party, brought an effigy of a shrouded Palestinian child into parliament during a meeting meant to address the budget of the region of Murcia.

Her gesture was meant to represent the thousands of Palestinian children killed in Gaza.

“Spain, its people, and the people of Murcia will never be friends with the perpetrators of the genocide,” she said, criticizing officials’ disregard for Gaza’s ongoing suffering.

Hoy los santos inocentes son los más de 8.000 niños asesinados en Palestina por Israel y el rey Herodes es el genocida Benjamin Netanyahu.

Los mártires de Gaza, presentes en el Pleno. El mundo no puede cerrar los ojos. Paremos el genocidio #FreePalestine 🙏🏻 🇵🇸 pic.twitter.com/XF3pHu2wEI

— María Marín (@MariaMarinMart) December 28, 2023

Translation: Today, the holy innocents are the more than 8,000 children murdered in Palestine by Israel, and King Herod is the genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu. The martyrs of Gaza, present in the plenary. The world cannot close its eyes. Let’s stop the genocide.

South Africa has displayed robust support for Palestinians over Israel’s war on Gaza. As Nabila Bana explains, this solidarity has a long history rooted in South Africa’s apartheid past ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/G3a0yazKhD

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) December 28, 2023

Hezbollah has published a video on its Telegram channel showing one of its unmanned combat aerial vehicles targeting an Israeli army checkpoint in the vicinity of the Kiryat Shmona city near the Lebanese border.

The group also said it was “targeting Israeli enemy settlements in response to its attacks on civilians in southern Lebanon”.

Earlier, the movement said it targeted an Israeli military vehicle inside the Ramot Naftali barracks.

A Hamas delegation is set to travel to Cairo tomorrow to give its “observations” on an Egyptian plan for a ceasefire in Gaza, a Hamas official told the AFP news agency.

The plan was put last week to officials of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group but is not expected to be accepted by Israel. The plan reportedly calls for staggered pauses in fighting and the gradual release of captives moving towards a full ceasefire.

The Hamas official quoted said the delegation would be from Hamas’s political office in Qatar.

The official said Hamas’s response to the plan focuses on “the modalities of the planned exchanges and the number of Palestinian prisoners to be freed, as well as obtaining guarantees for a complete Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza”.

We’ve been reporting on the strike that hit a residential building in the southern Gaza city, very close to an Al Jazeera team.

Watch the video of our team’s reporting on the aftermath of the strike:

The Palestinian Red Crescent has said it evacuated eight people following the strike on the house in central Gaza.

In a video posted on X, a large fire can be seen with emergency responders walking through a heavily damaged home.

Two young children and an elderly man with a head injury can be seen among the wounded.

🚨The PRCS teams evacuate 8 casualties, 🚑including children, due to the Israeli targeting of a house in Al-Zawaida in the central #Gaza Strip, causing it to catch fire. 👇In this video, we witness horrifying scenes of a large fire, and ambulance teams working under ⚠️dangerous… pic.twitter.com/3FKW1936Os

— PRCS (@PalestineRCS) December 28, 2023

The meeting was set to be the first to focus on Israel’s plans for Gaza after its military operations end.

The cancellation comes after the meeting was criticised by the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who had said the subject was outside of the war council’s mandate.

Far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist party had also announced it was holding its own meeting in protest over Smotrich’s exclusion from the discussion.

Both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are part of the wider Israeli security council, but are not part of the war cabinet, whose main members are Netanyahu, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and opposition leader Benny Gantz.

Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut reported that the Israeli war cabinet convened this evening but stopped short of discussing what will happen the day after the war on Gaza.

“They were supposed to talk about what’s going to happen the day after the war, or as Israel refers to it, ‘the day after Hamas’,” Salhut said, speaking from occupied East Jerusalem.

“However, there have been several objections among Netanyahu’s own coalition, to have these discussions. Israeli media is now reporting that the prime minister has succumbed to that pressure and those discussions will not happen just yet.”

The fierce opposition is coming from members of the far right, specifically ultranationalists within Netanyahu’s government like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, Salhut said. The two ministers are not part of the war cabinet but have objected to a lot of decisions. If they left Netanyahu’s coalition, it could fall apart.

“There are a lot of different pressures Netanyahu is under, such as the internal political pressure between him and his own government,” Salhut said.

The latest incidents include an attack on the al-Maghazi Prep School on December 25, in which two internally displaced people sheltering there were killed and another person was wounded, according to the UN agency.

The agency is also verifying damage by a nearby attack to the Bureij sanitation office.

UNRWA has recorded 193 incidents affecting their facilities in Gaza, including 60 direct hits.

It estimates at least 308 internally displaced people have been killed at its shelters, with more than 1,000 injured since the beginning of the war. At least 142 UNRWA staff have been killed.

In an interview with the US’s Public Broadcasting Corporation (PBS), Roger Carstens says that Qatar is “playing a very strong and important role as an intermediary”.

“There are times when, of course, the United States does not really have entree into some of the negotiating groups, and this is a case where Qatar has really been able to bring its gravitas in the region to bear,” he told PBS.

“The bottom line is,” Carstens continued, “we’re in this to make sure that everyone gets back. And even if we were to get all of our Americans back, we are going to stay there and work to get all the hostages back, and we’re done when everyone is accounted for.”