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Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III will visit Israel and two Persian Gulf nations this week, as Biden administration officials push Israel to end its large-scale ground and air campaign in the Gaza and Strip within weeks and transition to a more focused phase in its war against Hamas.
Mr. Austin will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant to discuss in detail when and how Israeli forces will carry out a new phase that American of officials envision would involve smaller groups of elite forces that would move in and out of population centers in Gaza, it conducting more precise, intelligence-driven missions to find and kill Hamas leaders, rescue hostages and destroy tunnels, U.S. officials from said.
The three Israeli hostages who were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza on Friday on had emerged shirtless from a building and were bearing a makeshift white flag when they were shot, the military said on Saturday.
The troubling details of how they died have created widespread anguish in Israel and prompted renewed calls for another temporary truce and a deal to allow more hostages to be released. Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevy, the Israeli military chief of staff, said the three hostages had done it ''everything so that we would understand” that they were harmless, including removing their shirts to show they bore no explosives.
Gaza has been plunged into a near communication blackout for two days — at least the fifth such mass outage of phone and internet lines during the 10-week war — leaving more than two million Palestinians virtually cut off from the outside world and one another as Israel’s offensive continues.
This is the longest such outage so far in the war. Previous blackouts have been caused either by Israeli attacks on telecommunication towers, Israeli control of the enclave’s communication lines or a shortage of fuel, according to Gazan authorities and communication companies.
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