Israel-Hamas War day 305: What's happening in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon?

Turkey will submit on Wednesday a declaration of intervention in South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague, a diplomatic source said.

The source added that the declaration will happen at 1330 GMT after Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said this week that Turkey would make the declaration on Wednesday.

"Turkey's intervention pushes the international community to recognize and address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza," the source said.

In May, Turkey said it had decided to join the case launched by South Africa as it stepped up measures against Israel over the assault on Gaza, adding that its bid would follow the necessary legal preparations.

In June, Spain said it had asked to intervene in the case at the ICJ, the highest legal body of the United Nations, established in 1945 to resolve disputes between states.

Israel has repeatedly dismissed the case's accusations of genocide as baseless, arguing in court that its operations in Gaza are self-defense and targeted at Hamas militants who attacked Israel on October 7.

The US and UK have conducted strikes on the Taiz Governate on the coast of Yemen, the Houthi-owned Al-Masirah reported on Wednesday morning.

IDF Arabic Spokesperson Avichay Adraee warned Gazan civilians in the Beit Hanoun area of Gaza, including those in the Manshiyya and Sheikh Zayed neighborhoods and those currently residing in shelters in the vicinity, to evacuate the area in a post to X, formerly Twitter, early Wednesday morning.

Beit Hanoun is a city located in the northern portion of the Gaza Strip.

Ambassador Gilad Erdan, speaking at a special event marking the end of his term at the UN, warned that the United Nations's inaction on addressing the issue of Iran was encouraging the Islamic Republic to continue its aggression on Israel.

"Iran interprets the silence of the world and the UN as giving a green light to attack Israel," Erdan said. "It is just like the shameful silence of the world when the Nazis decided at the Wannsee Conference on the genocide of the Jewish people."
 

A border police officer was lightly wounded after a terrorist stabbed her with a screwdriver in a terror attack at the Tunnels Checkpoint on Route 60 south of Jerusalem, the police said on Tuesday. 

The terrorist was eliminated by IDF troops and border police officers operating at the checkpoint, the police said.

19 Israelis were wounded on Tuesday by Hezbollah’s drone attacks, according to the Galilee Medical Center in Safed.

Besides those attacks, Hezbollah also launched around 30 rockets into northern Israel, portions toward the Golan and portions toward the Galilee.

Israel Air Force fighter jets struck a Hezbollah military base where terrorists were located and operating on Tuesday in the area of the Yaroun village in Lebanon, the IDF said in the early hours of Wednesday.

In addition, the fighter jets also struck a Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure site in the area of Kfarkela in southern Lebanon. 

The United States sent additional warships to the Middle East that are capable of defending against missiles amid an increase in tensions between Iran and Israel. 

“We've adjusted our military posture to strengthen our force protection,” US Secretary of State Lloyd Austin said at a press conference in Maryland.

Yahya Sinwar will replace Ismail Haniyeh in Hamas' operations, following his assassination in Tehran, the terror group announced in a statement on Tuesday night.

"The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas announces the selection of Commander Yahya Sinwar as the head of the political bureau of the movement, succeeding the martyr Commander Ismail Haniyeh, may Allah have mercy on him," the movement said in a brief statement. 

There is non-stop talk of Israeli preemptive strikes on Iran and on Hezbollah, given that Jerusalem has been waiting since the July 31 killings of Hezbollah’s military chief and Hamas’s political chief (while he was in Tehran) for an expected massive retaliation from Lebanon and from the Islamic Republic.

As time has dragged on and the certainty of retaliation also grows, more and more analysts have asked why Israel should wait to be hit with unprecedented power from these two enemy states if it can instead hit them first and reduce the effectiveness of the expected attacks.

With rife speculation about what preemptive strikes might look like, The Jerusalem Post dug into the issue and found that a variety of factors must be treated differently in the IDF’s thinking, rather than be lumped together.