Israel’s Genocide Day 430: Progress reported in ceasefire talks as Israel continues to carry out massacres across Gaza

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 took over several positions inside Syrian sovereign territory, including the summit of Mount Al-Sheikh, with no resistance according to Israeli reports.

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