Above photo: Palestinians inspect the damage in the aftermath of an Israeli strike on a tent camp, in Deir El-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, on December 8, 2024. Omar Ashtawy/APA Images.
As Israel continues to carry out massacres across Gaza.
Israel continued its attacks across the Gaza Strip as a Hamas delegation returned from Egypt amid reports of progress in ceasefire talks.
Casualties
- 44,758 + killed* and at least 106,134 wounded in the Gaza Strip, 59% of whom are women, children, and elderly.
- 808+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
- 3,962 Lebanese killed and more than 16,520 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***
- Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,189.
- Israel recognizes the death of 890 Israeli soldiers, policemen and intelligence officers and the injury of at least 5,065 others since October 7.****
* Gaza’s branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report, published through its WhatsApp channel on December 9, 2024. Rights groups and public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher.
** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. This is the latest figure according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as of December 9, 2024.
*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on December 9, 2024. The counting is based on the Lebanese official date for the beginning of “the Israeli aggression on Lebanon,” when Israel began airstrikes on Lebanese territory after the beginning of Hezbollah’s “support front” for Gaza.
**** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7 and as of June 18.
Key Developments
Gaza
- Israel has killed 178 Palestinians and wounded 395 more in strikes across the Gaza Strip since Friday, December 6.
- Israeli forces raided a school sheltering civilians in Beit Lahia in the north of Gaza, and set fire to it, forcing civilians to evacuate, according to local reports.
- Israeli warplanes and artillery bombed Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, and Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip.
- Israeli forces detonated residential buildings in the Saftawi neighborhood in Gaza City and in Jabalia.
- The director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, appealed to international institutions to stop the “barbaric” assaults against healthcare workers and patients.
- Israeli forces targeted the Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza with artillery shells, wounding six patients, one of them in a “serious condition”. The hospital issued an urgent call demanding international protection, and “safe evacuation of the wounded”.
- Hamas handed Egypt the list of Israeli captives who would be released in the first phase of a potential prisoner exchange with Israel.
- The Israeli public broadcasting reports progress in Gaza ceasefire talks in Cairo.
- Hamas’s negotiations team returned from Cairo after talks with Egyptian intelligence and with Fatah representatives over the forming of an independent committee to run Gaza after a ceasefire agreement.
Lebanon, Yemen
- Israel killed one Lebanese and wounded four Lebanese army soldiers in a strike on south Lebanon.
- Lebanon announced that Israel has breached the ceasefire agreement 156 times as of last Saturday.
- The Israeli army admitted the killing of four of its soldiers in a booby-trapped tunnel in southern Lebanon.
- A drone from Yemen struck a residential building in Tel Aviv after Israeli air defenses fail to intercept it.
- Israel warns Yemen’s Ansarallah of a “crushing strike.”
Syria
- Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu announces the end of the 1974 forces disengagement agreement with Syria, following the collapse of the Syrian regime.
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu celebrates the collapse of the Syrian regime in a televised statement from the occupied Golan Heights, saying that Syria “was a key part of the Iranian alliance.”
- Israeli forces cross the de-militarized buffer zone established in 1974 between the occupied part of the Syrian Golan Heights and the Syrian-held area and take over key positions inside Syrian sovereign territory.
- Israeli warplanes bomb the Syrian capital of Damascus, hitting the military airport and the scientific research center on the outskirts of the city.
West Bank
- Israel announced the confiscation of 24,000 dunams (~5,930 acres) for settlement expansion use, including 20,000 dunams (~4,942 acres) in the Jordan Valley, in one of the largest Israeli grabs of Palestinian land in years.
- Israeli forces killed two Palestinians aged 26 and 32 in an airstrike on Tubas in the northern West Bank. According to local reports, Israeli forces prevented ambulances from accessing the site and withheld both men’s bodies.
- The Palestinian Prisoners’ Affairs Commission reports that dozens of Palestinian prisoners suffered infections after receiving bad-quality meals in the Israeli Etzion prison.
- Israeli settlers destroy a farming tent and assault its owner in the village of al-Minya, near Bethlehem.
- Israeli settlers assault two Palestinians in the town of Taybeh, east of Ramallah, causing a serious head injury to one of them.
- Israeli settlers vandalize Palestinian property, and graffiti anti-Palestinian tags in several locations around Jericho.
Israel occupies new Syrian territory following the Assad regime collapse
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Israel’s dissolution of its commitment to the 1974 forces disengagement agreement with Syria, which ended the 1973 war between the two countries. Netanyahu made his announcement in a televised statement from the occupied Syrian Golan Heights on Sunday.
Netanyahu’s declarations came shortly after Israeli forces breached the de-militarized buffer zone between the Israeli-occupied and the Syrian-held territory in the Golan. Israeli forces invaded and took over several positions inside Syrian sovereign territory, including the summit of Mount Al-Sheikh, with no resistance according to Israeli reports.
Early on Sunday, the Syrian rebel coalition “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham” announced the fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The regime had ruled Syria for more than two decades and was preceded by the regime of Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, since the 1970s. Simultaneously, Syrian opposition forces took over key government buildings in Damascus. Hours before, Al-Assad was reported to have fled the Syrian capital. Russia later confirmed that the Syrian president had been granted asylum in the country.
Overnight between Saturday and Sunday, Israeli warplanes bombed key targets in and around Damascus, including the capital’s military airport and the Syrian Scientific Research Center.
Syria fought Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973. Hafez Al-Assad took power in Syria in a military coup in 1970, in what was seen as one of the repercussions of Syria’s defeat by Israel in 1967. Under Hafez Al-Assad, Syria participated, along with Egypt, in the October 1973 war against Israel, and liberated part of its occupied territory in the Golan Heights. In 1974, Syria and Israel signed a ceasefire and “forces disengagement” agreement, which created a de-militarized zone between Israeli-occupied and Syrian-held territory.
Assad’s Syria also fought Israel in the Sultan Yacoub battle, during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, alongside Palestinian resistance groups, but didn’t participate directly in the rest of the war on Lebanon. Syria had sent forces into Lebanon in 1976, as part of a larger Arab coalition to contain the Lebanese civil war.
Throughout the 1990s, Assad used Syria’s military presence in Lebanon to influence Lebanese politics and became the main supporter of the Lebanese resistance during the rise of Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon. Syria represented Hezbollah in indirect negotiations with Israel, through the U.S., during the 1996 Israeli “grapes of wrath” assault on Lebanon, leading to the “April understanding” that stipulated avoiding the targeting of civilians on both sides.
Syria never recognized Israel, although under Hafez al-Assad, it engaged in negotiations with it in the late 1990s aimed at reaching an agreement based on Israel’s return of the Golan Heights in exchange for Syria’s recognition of Israel. Hafez al-Assad’s government insisted on signing peace with Israel only when Israel signed a final peace agreement with Palestinians that would lead to a Palestinian state. Neither of these things ever happened.
Bashar al-Assad came to power after the death of his father in the year 2000 and continued the same policy in regard to Israel, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian question. In 2005, Syria withdrew its forces from Lebanon after widespread protests that erupted following the assassination of Lebanon’s Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. However, it reinforced its influence in Lebanon after the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon, bolstering Hezbollah’s status as a resistance force in the region.
In 2011, amid the Arab Spring revolutions, protests erupted across Syria against Assad’s regime, which had become notorious in Syria for brutal repression of dissidents and the disappearance and torture of ordinary Syrians critical of the regime. Assad responded with violent repression of protesters, including with live fire, killing scores of Syrians. Protests soon evolved into armed confrontations between regime forces and armed rebels, who were joined by dissident army members. Simultaneously, armed groups made of foreign fighters also began to form, receiving arms and support from regional and foreign countries antagonistic to Assad. The most notorious of these groups was the ‘Al-Nusra Front’, which sprang from Syria’s branch of Al-Qaeda. Its leader, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, now known as Abu Mohammad Al-Joulani, later dissociated himself from Al-Qaeda and became the leader of the current Syrian rebel force which toppled Assad.
Throughout the Syrian civil war, Assad employed carpet bombing of civilian areas, causing the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Syrians. He has been accused of war crimes by several human rights organizations, which also accused rebel groups of committing war crimes as well.
Al-Assad’s regime also played a key role in the Iranian-led military alliance that connected militia groups across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.
After the ISIS takeover of large parts of Iraq, the Iraqi ‘Popular Mobilization’ was formed, which included a coalition of Iraqi militias backed by Iran. The ‘Popular Mobilization’ fought against ISIS and was credited as a key element in its defeat. The coalition, which was later recognized as part of the Iraqi armed forces by the Iraqi state, would join an Iranian-led military alliance geographically connecting Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, which increased Syria’s strategic importance in the region, and facing Israel.
This alliance was strengthened after Iraqi militias, Iranian military advisors, and Hezbollah fighters assisted Assad during the Syrian civil war against rebel groups between 2012 and 2018, leading to Assad’s control of large parts of Syria. Israel increased its bombing of Syrian territory, especially Syrian army targets throughout these years, claiming that it was targeting provision routes between Iran and Hezbollah. Syria never responded to Israel’s attacks.
The collapse of the Assad regime represents a major change in the Middle East’s geopolitical map. This change will have important impacts on Israel’s relation to the rest of the region and on the future course of the Palestinian cause. As the new phase of Syria’s history has yet to take form, this impact remains uncertain.