The Mirror, The Independent, Sky News, The Guardian, and The BBC report that a British teenager, 19 year old Binyamin Needham was killed while fighting for Israel as an IDF soldier. Needham made Aliyah with his family when he was 8 years old. He had reportedly only been in the Gaza Strip for two days when he was killed. He was from Edgware in North London.

Sky News, The Telegraph, The Guardian and Reuters all report that Israeli authorities are investigating claims some investors may have known in advance about the Hamas plan to attack Israel on 7 October and used that information to make hundreds of millions of pounds. Research by US law professors Robert Jackson Jr and Joshua Mitts, from New York University and Columbia University respectively, found significant short selling of shares leading up to the massacre, which triggered a war that has raged for nearly two months. 

The BBC reports evidence of rape, sexual violence and mutilation of women during the 7 October Hamas attacks. Several people involved in collecting and identifying the bodies of those killed in the attack told The BBC they had seen multiple signs of sexual assault, including broken pelvises, bruises, cuts and tears, and that the victims ranged from children and teenagers to pensioners. Video testimony of an eyewitness at the Nova music festival, shown to journalists by Israeli police, detailed the gang rape, mutilation and execution of one victim. The Guardian also reports on the UN hearing accounts of sexual violence on October 7th.

The Guardian reports that recently released hostages and relatives of Israelis still held by Hamas in Gaza have confronted Benjamin Netanyahu at an angry meeting in which some of those present reportedly called on the Israeli prime minister to resign. The meeting on Tuesday was addressed by relatives of those still in captivity and by recently returned hostages, some of whom reportedly described mental and physical abuse at the hands of their captors.

Sky News reports that a five-year-old Israeli girl has returned to nursery for the first time since being released from Hamas captivity. Emilia Aloni and her mother Daniel were taken hostage by Hamas in Nir Oz on 7 October while visiting Emilia’s aunt, Sharon Aloni-Cunio. The three family members, in addition to Sharon’s three-year-old twins Emma and Yuli and their father David Cunio – were released in the brief ceasefire at the end of November.

Sky News says that the effect Israel’s war in Gaza is having on civilians is ‘brutal to see’ as Israel said its troops have entered Gaza’s second-largest city, Khan Younis.

Sky News also reports that Israel could pump thousands of gallons of seawater into the labyrinthine network of tunnels underneath Gaza in a bid to flush out Hamas fighters, a military expert says. The potential to flood the tunnels, which the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports the Israeli military is considering, would be a significant move and would come with steep risks.

The Financial Times reports that Israel has expended vast amounts of ammunition in its war against Hamas in Gaza. The modern western weaponry used, from satellite-guided “bunker busting” bombs to pinpoint-accurate laser-guided missiles, have eroded Hamas’s military capabilities and, according to the Israel Defense Forces, killed more than 5,000 of the group’s estimated 30,000 fighters. 

The Guardian, The Financial Times and Reuters all report that the US on Tuesday began imposing visa bans on people involved in violence in the West Bank, after several appeals for Israel to do more prevent violence by Jewish settlers. A new State Department visa restriction policy targets “individuals believed to have been involved in undermining peace, security, or stability in the West Bank, including through committing acts of violence or taking other actions that unduly restrict civilians’ access to essential services and basic necessities,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement. The BBC also reports on Settler violence. 

The BBC has updated its article detailing definitions and explanations of what is happening in Israel and in Gaza. 

The Guardian reports that Vladimir Putin will travel to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia on Wednesday on a rare overseas trip to discuss the Israel-Hamas war as Moscow seeks to reassert Russia’s role in the Middle East. With the prospect of another ceasefire in Gaza receding, the Russian president is making only his fifth trip abroad since the international criminal court issued an arrest warrant for him in March that accused him of responsibility for the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.

The Times reports that Hamas’s battle plans for its attack on Israel on October 7 show that the terrorists were more ambitious than realised, according to evidence gathered by the Israeli military and disclosed on Monday. Instructions and maps found on Hamas fighters killed in the attacks and in later raids in Gaza suggest that military bases deep inside Israel were among the targets. The plans, some found on laptop computers taken from terrorists’ vehicles and others in notebooks and phones, give instructions to individual units. There are also booklets about weaponry including how to strike weak spots on Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles.

The Telegraph reports that the immigration minister Robert Jenrick challenged BBC presenter Mishal Husain on BBC’s Radio 4 over her line of questioning as he says Hamas must be eradicated. 

Maariv covers the meeting yesterday between the members of Israel’s war cabinet and representatives from the hostage families. Also in attendance were several former hostages released in the recent exchanges, one of whom reportedly said: “the hostages are suffering a Holocaust that includes severe sexual abuse. Men are raped there, too, not just women.” The meeting was “stormy”, says the paper, with a family member telling the cabinet members “you have no idea what’s going on in Gaza. You’re killing our children.” “Bombs from a plane exploded above us,” said a released hostage. “The Hamasniks carried on sleeping. They don’t care about your bombing raids.”

Another former hostage said: “I neither slept nor ate. I was in a lot of different places, and every second I expected to be blown up. A Hamasnik who could have been my grandson stood in front of me and threatened me in every possible way. We were sitting down, and suddenly a cupboard fell on top of us from the blast. They would touch the girls, and everyone knew about it. We developed the habit of never going anywhere without someone to protect us. Medicines ran out, we had the wrong medicines. They told us there was no Israel [any more]. We believed that Israel had abandoned us, that’s what they led us to believe. I suffered there minute by minute. I thought I was about to die, and was already saying, ‘Just shoot me.’”

It was at this point that Prime Minister Netanyahu said: “I have too much respect for you. The price Hamas wants isn’t prisoners, it’s the State of Israel. If the option of bringing everyone back at a single stroke were to evolve,  do you think there’s anyone here who wouldn’t agree to it? Of course they would, and how!” Some family members complained about the approach the government took to the meeting. “The meeting was a model of how the state is run,” said one. “We were invited for three o’clock. They came up only at a quarter to four. They left us to become irritated and squabble among ourselves. I left in the middle. This is unacceptable.” “They say, ‘We’ve done this, we’ve done that.’ But they weren’t the ones who did anything. It’s infuriating,” said another family member, referring to the meeting as “insulting.” He added, “I got up and told the defence minister, ‘You’re insulting our intelligence with your answers,’ and went outside. The testimonies were appalling, to the point of tears.”

Kan Radio reports that some of the hostage families have argued that the government should change its approach and stop the fighting in Gaza in an effort to secure the release of the remaining captives.

Yediot Ahronot’s Nadav Eyal, a consistent champion of the hostage issue, writes “It wasn’t just the personal accounts and the sense shared by some of the families that the war cabinet still doesn’t fully understand just how dire the hostages’ situation is. It was also the conflict among them [the families], which almost came to blows over the demand for an immediate and huge deal; and over which hostages’ release should be prioritised, or what has come to be referred to as the ‘categories.’” Defending the government in the sense that no “all for all” deal for a hostage exchange has been suggested by Hamas Eyal nonetheless writes that “the problem is that Israel hasn’t been operating efficiently and effectively on the diplomatic and public plane to secure the hostages’ release. For example, the hostages are being subjected to torture. That is the legal definition of physical attacks, starvation, humiliation, withholding medicine, denying medical treatment, psychological warfare and all of the other horrors that Hamas has been perpetrating against our brothers and sisters in Gaza. That message—that the hostages are being tortured—which has been reinforced by first-person accounts by people who were freed from captivity, still hasn’t been properly delivered yet. It hasn’t been sufficiently stressed. Why is it important? It is important for enlisting international support and to try to force Hamas to prove otherwise.”

Ynet details yesterday’s 15-rocket barrage from Gaza on central Israel. The attacks came only two days after the Home Front Command lifted restrictions on the Gush Dan area, with schools returning to normal. A 40-year-old man was slightly injured in Tel Aviv, where shrapnel caused damage to a city school classroom, a main street in the city, and also in the Tel Baruch beach area. Multiple rockets were launched towards the southern city of Ashkelon, where two women in their 60s were slightly injured by shrapnel.

Haaretz reports the Biden Administration’s decision to impose US visa bans on Israeli settlers who have engaged in violence against West Bank Palestinians. It is, says the paper, “the most punitive measure undertaken by the US toward Israel in decades.” US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said “We have underscored to the Israeli government the need to do more to hold accountable extremist settlers who have committed violent attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank. As President Biden has repeatedly said, those attacks are unacceptable.”