Middle East Crisis: Live Updates: Netanyahu to Address Congress
Netanyahu will speak at 2 p.m. Eastern. Here’s the latest.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to forcefully defend Israel’s military campaign in Gaza during an address on Wednesday to a joint session of Congress, a visit that is laying bare the divisions in Washington over a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Mr. Netanyahu, who was invited to speak by congressional leaders from both parties, is hoping to shore up support from the United States, Israel’s most powerful ally, in the face of increasing international censure. The remarks will also be closely watched beyond Washington for any sign of progress toward a cease-fire with Hamas, the armed group whose Oct. 7 attack on Israel touched off the war, as U.S.-backed negotiations appear to be at a standstill.
Here’s what to know:
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Democratic divisions: Progressives in the Democratic Party have been harshly critical of Israel and of Mr. Netanyahu’s conduct of the war, and many seats on the Democrats’ side of the House chamber are expected to be empty when he takes the lectern. Among those who have said they won’t attend are Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York; Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker; and Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the sole Palestinian American in Congress, who has called the invitation to Mr. Netanyahu “utterly disgraceful.” The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, who would traditionally preside over the speech in her role as vice president, will also not be there, citing a scheduling conflict.
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Meeting candidates: Mr. Netanyahu will meet with Ms. Harris in Washington on Thursday, after a separate meeting with President Biden. The two men will also meet with family members of Americans held hostage by Hamas, the White House said. The Israeli leader will then travel to Florida to meet with former President Donald J. Trump at his private club, Mar-a-Lago, on Friday. The Israeli leader was invited to Washington weeks ago, before Mr. Biden’s decision not to seek re-election. The relationship between Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu has grown testier in recent months as the war has dragged on.
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Past addresses: Facing growing international condemnation of the war, Mr. Netanyahu signaled that he would strike a conciliatory tone, saying before departing for Washington that he hoped to show that “America and Israel stand together today, tomorrow and always.” That is likely to make this address less contentious than the last time he spoke to Congress, in 2015, when the Republican House speaker at the time invited him without informing the White House. Mr. Netanyahu then used the platform to rail against the Obama administration’s negotiation of a nuclear pact between world powers and Iran.
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Protests: Mr. Netanyahu’s visit has brought thousands of activists from around the United States to protest his conduct of the war in Gaza. About 400 American Jews, including two dozen rabbis, held a demonstration in a House office building on Tuesday, leading to arrests by the Capitol Police.
Reporting from Washington
Nearly 100 House and Senate interns are calling in sick to protest Netanyahu’s speech. In a statement, the interns called on their bosses to boycott the address. “We urge our representatives to respond to the collective will of the American people and reject any semblance of endorsement for Netanyahu’s actions,” it said.
Reporting from Washington
The intern “sick-out” adds to congressional staff’s growing dissent over Israel’s actions in Gaza. Earlier this month, the Congressional Progressive Staff Association urged lawmakers to protest or boycott Netanyahu’s speech. They circulated a letter signed by 230 anonymous House and Senate aides from across 122 Democratic and Republican congressional offices.
Reporting from Jerusalem
As Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, prepared to address Congress, the military pressed ahead with day three of an offensive in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. Troops had targeted militants “mostly using sniper fire” and also used tank and aerial fire to kill the occupants of a vehicle who had been identified as fighters. In addition, the military conducted raids in Rafah. Israel’s operations in both cities have caused widespread destruction and forced their populations to flee.
Reporting from Washington
Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, says he will not be attending Netanyahu’s speech, denouncing the event as “political theater.” In a social media post, Mr. Massie says “the purpose of having Netanyahu address Congress is to bolster his political standing in Israel,” echoing some of the criticism the prime minister is facing back home.
Pro-Palestinian protestors arrived in Washington on Wednesday before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was scheduled to address Congress.
Reporting from Washington
Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, will not attend Netanyahu’s speech, according to a spokesman. This morning she will join a meeting with “Israeli citizens whose families have suffered in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack and kidnappings,” the spokesman said. Many Democrats have said they will skip the speech, and earlier this summer Pelosi said Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, should not have added his name to the invitation to Netanyahu.
Families of the hostages are pressing for a deal, while key coalition partners are taking a hard line.
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel addresses a joint session of Congress on Wednesday afternoon, attention won’t just be coming from Capitol Hill.
World leaders, antiwar protesters, families of hostages in Gaza, Israeli voters, political opponents and allies in his far-right ruling bloc will be listening closely for any hint of his intentions. A dominant concern is whether and under what terms Israel might reach a cease-fire deal with Hamas to end the war in Gaza and return hostages taken from Israel during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7.
A group of relatives of American hostages who met with Mr. Netanyahu on Monday said that if his speech does not announce a deal to return the roughly 120 hostages still in Gaza — around 40 of whom are believed to be dead — it would be “an absolute failure.”
But if Mr. Netanyahu signals that he might agree to the current deal, he could alienate the far-right members of his fragile coalition government.
“We are here in Washington to make clear to the world that the Israeli people want a deal — and if Netanyahu refuses to reach one, he must resign,” said Zahiro Shahar Mor, a nephew of Abraham Munder, who remains captive in Gaza after more than nine months. Other members of the Munder family were released as part of a temporary cease-fire deal late last year.
But some far-right ministers in Mr. Netanyahu’s ruling coalition have threatened to abandon the bloc if he closes the deal with Hamas. They want the group eradicated through military force instead. Mr. Netanyahu has sent mixed messages about the deal’s prospects, giving rise to criticism at home and abroad that he could be stalling.
“This visit prioritizes his personal political survivability over our shared interests,” a group of more than 30 Israeli luminaries from the defense, industry, academia, law and public service sectors told the bipartisan group of congressional leaders who invited Mr. Netanyahu to speak, in a letter dated Tuesday and shared with reporters.
Mr. Netanyahu’s visit has brought thousands of activists from around the country to protest his conduct of the war in Gaza. The war has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health authorities; displaced nearly everyone in Gaza; and caused widespread destruction, disease and hunger.
While protesters marched in Tel Aviv, calling for a hostage deal, about 400 American Jews, including two dozen rabbis, rallied in a House office building on Tuesday, ahead of Mr. Netanyahu’s speech, leading to arrests by the Capitol Police.
Mr. Netayanhu will meet with President Biden on Thursday in Washington. He is also set to meet with Kamala Harris, the vice president and Democratic presidential contender, who has been more critical of Israel’s conduct of the war.
On Friday, the prime minister will travel to Florida to visit Donald J. Trump, the former president and Republican presidential nominee, with whom he has had a close, though sometimes strained, relationship. Mr. Trump has supported the expansionist policies of Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right government and retains the support of his most extreme coalition members.
Hepatitis A and other diseases have surged among Gaza’s displaced people, the U.N. says.
Sally Thabet, 40, said she had done all she could to protect her three daughters from illness after they fled their home in Gaza City, taking refuge in the town of Deir al Balah. But living in a former minimart, sharing a toilet with 20 others and washing dishes with dirty seawater, no amount of hand sanitizer could help.
One by one her girls fell sick with what doctors diagnosed as hepatitis A, a viral liver infection that is transmitted through person-to-person contact or contaminated food or water, and can spread quickly in unsanitary conditions.
“Amoon was the first to be diagnosed two months ago,” she said last week, adding that the 10-year-old girl developed a stomachache, stopped eating, started vomiting and looked pale. “I couldn’t see how yellowish she was because it is very dark inside the store.” Her other two children, Kenzy 15, and Kandi, 11, followed soon after.
More than 100,000 people in Gaza have contracted acute jaundice syndrome, or suspected hepatitis A, since the war between Hamas and Israel began on Oct. 7, the World Health Organization said last week.
It is just one disease that has spread rapidly in Gaza as most of the territory’s 2.2 million people have fled their homes, forced to live in squalid, crowded camps and makeshift shelters, while basic needs like clean water, sewage treatment, trash collection, soap and fuel for cooking have grown scarce.
There are also nearly one million cases of acute respiratory infections, half a million cases of diarrhea and 100,000 cases of lice and scabies, the W.H.O. said. On Friday, the agency’s chief, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that even polio, a disease that has been eradicated in much of the world, was present in Gaza. A variant of poliovirus has turned up there in six samples of water or wastewater, he said, meaning that some people there are infected, though no symptomatic cases have been reported.
Dr. Hanan Balkhy, the W.H.O. director for the eastern Mediterranean region, told members of the news media: “In the Gaza Strip, where garbage and sewage fill the streets, cases of acute respiratory infections, diarrheal illnesses, acute jaundice syndrome and skin infections are surging. The situation is indeed dire.”
People with hepatitis A usually recover fully within weeks or a few months, but some become seriously ill and a small number die. (It is unrelated to the more serious and long-lasting hepatitis B and C, which spread through blood contact.)
In the developed world, diarrheal illnesses and diseases like hepatitis A are relatively rare, and often not very serious. But in chaotic and crowded places with poor sanitation and malnutrition, they become much more common and dangerous. Since the war began, aid workers have warned of the threat of more serious epidemics in Gaza like cholera, which can quickly lead to mass mortality, but so far those have not materialized.
The disease spread in Gaza has coincided with Israeli airstrikes and ground combat in and around hospitals and clinics, damaging nearly all of them and forcing many to close. The large number of people treated for war injuries — almost 90,000, Gaza’s health ministry says — and the surge in illness have overwhelmed Gaza’s diminished medical system.
Dr. Balkhy said that more than 1,000 attacks on health care have been reported since Oct. 7. Israel’s military says that Hamas has stationed fighters and military equipment in hospitals as well as beneath them to take advantage of the cover they provide, a charge that Hamas and hospital officials dispute.
The Israeli military has launched two operations at Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, fighting deadly battles with militants there. An investigation by The New York Times found evidence that Hamas had stored weapons in tunnels beneath the hospital but could not confirm the Israeli claim that it was a Hamas command and control center.
Before the war, Gaza’s health care system was “reasonably well functional,” said Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, the W.H.O.’s representative to Gaza and the West Bank. Now, fewer than half of its facilities remain even partly operational, he said, and its health care work force is severely depleted.
Israel has promoted the establishment of new field hospitals to expand medical infrastructure for civilians in Gaza, according to COGAT, the arm of the Israeli military that implements policy in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
For the second time in a week, a U.N. convoy comes under fire in Gaza.
A marked convoy run by UNICEF, the United Nations’ relief agency for children, came under fire in Gaza on Tuesday while on its way to pick up five children as part of a humanitarian mission, U.N. officials said.
It was at least the second time this week that vehicles marked with U.N. logos and traveling along routes agreed to with the Israeli military were attacked at checkpoints in the Wadi Gaza corridor dividing the north and south of the enclave, the United Nations said. In both cases, bullets struck vehicles in the convoys while they were waiting at a designated holding area, but there were no deaths or injuries.
On Sunday, the Israeli military shot at a convoy run by UNRWA, the main U.N. agency for Palestinians, the U.N. said. The UNICEF vehicles that came under fire on Tuesday were near the same area as the earlier attack, but the U.N. said it was still not clear who was responsible.2
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The war in Gaza has been the deadliest conflict for the United Nations in the history of the organization, with 198 staff members killed and its facilities attacked hundreds of times, Stéphane Dujarric, a U.N. spokesman, said. Many workers from other humanitarian organizations have also been killed. The United Nations said last month that Gaza had become the most dangerous place in the world for aid workers.
“There is international law that protects them,” Mr. Dujarric said, “but the way for the law to protect them is for people to actually respect the law, respect the rules, respect the work of humanitarian workers.”
Photographs posted on social media by Adele Khord, UNICEF’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, showed bullet holes in one of the vehicles in Tuesday’s convoy. Ms. Khord said it was the second UNICEF convoy to be fired on in Gaza over the past four months, adding that “the humanitarian consequences could have been severe, for both our teams and the children they serve.”
Two clearly marked UNICEF vehicles were hit with live ammunition today while waiting at a designated holding point near the Wadi Gaza checkpoint. They were en route to reunite five children, including a baby, with their father.
One vehicle was struck by three bullets, but… pic.twitter.com/6dhjmqqk55— Adele Khodr (@AdeleKhodr) July 23, 2024
Despite the attack, UNICEF workers in two cars were able to complete the mission, continuing on to Gaza City to pick up the five children, Kurtis Cooper, a spokesman for UNICEF, said. “The children were successfully reunified with their father,” he said.
The head of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, said the attack on his agency’s convoy had involved “heavy shooting” that forced his team to duck and take cover. One of the cars was so heavily damaged it had to leave the convoy.
Louise Wateridge, a member of UNRWA’s communication team with the convoy, said bullets had ripped through the car in which she was riding in the front passenger seat. They missed her.
“Our safety should not be down to luck,” Ms. Wateridge wrote in a post on X on Tuesday.
Matthew Mpoke Bigg contributed reporting from Jerusalem.