Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu had a telephone conversation, during which they discussed developments in the war in Gaza. The phone call between the two, which the White House reported, came the day after the adoption of the UN Security Council resolution which called for more aid for civilians in the Strip but not a truce, a resolution which passed with the abstention of the United States and Russia. And it arrived on the day in which the Wall Street Journal published a reconstruction concerning Biden and Netanyahu: according to the newspaper, which cites well-informed sources, a few days after the Hamas assault on October 7 in southern Israel, the On October 11, the US president persuaded the Israeli prime minister to stop a pre-emptive strike against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, warning him that this attack could spark a broader regional war.
The US newspaper's reconstruction was quickly denied by Netanyahu's office, which defined the article as “incorrect”. According to the reconstruction of the WSJ, Israeli warplanes were in the air awaiting orders when Biden spoke to Netanyahu and told him to reflect on the consequences of such an action. “Israel had intelligence information, which the United States deemed unreliable, that Hezbollah attackers were preparing to cross the border as part of a multi-pronged attack,” the WSJ reports. But Netanyahu's office made it known that “already on the first day of the war, Prime Minister Netanyahu decided that Israel would first work to achieve a decisive victory in the south (Gaza ed.), while it would discourage an attack in the north ( Lebanon ed.)” and that “this policy was adopted by the war cabinet”.
New Israeli raids continued to hit Gaza in the hours following the UN Council meeting: 76 Palestinians, all members of the same extended family, were killed in an air strike that hit a building in Gaza City on Friday evening. The civil protection of the Strip, which reported it, said that among the victims there were also women and children. While an attack on the Nuseirat camp, in the center of the Strip, hit the house of a local TV journalist, Mohammed Khalifa, killing him and at least 14 other people.
In this context came a threat from Iran: if the US and its allies were to “continue committing crimes” in Gaza, “Israel's supporters should soon expect the closure of the Mediterranean Sea, the Strait of Gibraltar and the rest of the waterways,” said the deputy commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Reza Naghdim, without explaining how such a closure would be achieved. Iran does not overlook the Mediterranean Sea and it is not clear how the Revolutionary Guards can close it, but Naghdi spoke of the “birth of new resistance forces”, underlining that the Red Sea “has turned into a nightmare for Israel and its United States”.
Meanwhile, the IDF, i.e. the Israeli army, reported that in a raid on Rafah it had killed Hassan al-Atrash, responsible for the supply and production of weapons for Hamas, as well as for smuggling weapons from various countries into the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank. It added that it had arrested more than 200 Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants in the past week and brought them to Israel for interrogation, a statement that came after Palestinian reports of large-scale raids of teenagers and men from homes, shelters and hospitals in northern Gaza.
The Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said that “due to the bombings” by Israel they had “lost contact with the group responsible for five Israeli hostages” and added that they suspect that the prisoners were killed in one of the raids: they provided the names of 3 of the hostages – Haim Gershon Peri, Yoram Etak Metzger and Amiram Israel Cooper; they appeared in a video that was released by the Al-Qassam Brigades on December 18 with the title 'Don't let us grow old here', in which the hostages asked their families and the Israeli government not to abandon them.
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