Israel-Hamas War Day 178: What is going on in Gaza, Lebanon?

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday said Washington has urged Israel to carry out a swift, thorough, and impartial investigation into an Israeli airstrike that killed seven people working for celebrity chef Jose Andres' World Central Kitchen charity in Gaza.

"We've spoken directly to the Israeli government about this particular incident. We've urged a swift, thorough, and impartial investigation to understand exactly what happened," Blinken told reporters at a news conference in Paris, adding that humanitarian workers must be protected.

The IDF announced on Monday night its intention to confiscate and destroy the houses of terrorists Muhammad Zaidat and Ahmed Zaidat, who committed the joint ramming and stabbing attacks in Ra'anana in January.

During the terror attack, 79-year-old Edna Bluestein was killed, and dozens of others were wounded. 

The terrorists reside in the southern West Bank town of Bani Naim.

The US told Iran that it "had no involvement" or advanced knowledge of an Israeli strike on a diplomatic compound in Syria, Axios reported on Monday, citing a US official.

A spokesperson for the National Security Council also told the news website that there was no American involvement in the alleged Israeli strike and that they "did not know about it ahead of time." A senior US official said the United States had notified Iran of this clarification.

The report claims that the Biden administration could be concerned that the alleged Israeli strike could lead to an escalation of conflict in the region, as well as provoke Iranian attacks against US forces.

Iran vowed on Tuesday to take revenge on Israel for an airstrike that killed two of its top generals and five other military advisers at the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus, underlining the risk of further escalation after the unprecedented attack.

The conflict has rippled across the Middle East since the onset of the Gaza war; until now, Tehran has carefully avoided direct conflict with Israel while backing allies attacking Israeli and US targets.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday lamented the killing in an Israeli strike of seven people working for the World Central Kitchen aid group in Gaza, describing the incident as tragic and unintended.

"This happens in wartime. We are thoroughly looking into it, are in contact with the governments (of the foreigners among the dead), and will do everything to ensure it does not happen again," Netanyahu said in a video statement.

The delegation of Mossad, Shin Bet, and IDF officials who went to Cairo for hostage release and ceasefire negotiations was set to return to Israel on Tuesday afternoon, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office.

As part of the talks, the mediators formulated a new proposal to present to Hamas.

"Israel expects the mediators to work harder with Hamas to promote negotiations in favor of a deal," said the PMO.

Israel expects the mediators to push Hamas harder

"The State of Israel continues to make all the necessary efforts to release the abductees from the hands of Hamas and return them to Israel."

It added that Israel expects the mediators to push Hamas harder to reach a deal.

Around half a day after the IDF’s disastrous mistaken killing of seven World Food Kitchen workers in central Gaza, the military has said that its COGAT and Southern Command branches are establishing a joint command center for handling humanitarian aid distribution.

The IDF said that such a command center was in the planning stages before the accidental air strikes on three WFK trucks, possibly by multiple IDF drones, but is being accelerated following the episode.

It is expected to start operating tonight, and the IDF expects that this will improve coordination between the battle and humanitarian coordination arms. However, the military said this coordination was significant even before the incident.

In addition, the IDF said that – given the sensitive nature of the incident globally - it is rushing to publicly produce details about what went wrong, which officials made mistakes, and how the mistakes developed as early as Tuesday night, but in any case within a mere matter of days.

This would not replace a potentially longer and more comprehensive investigation but would at least show the IDF’s good faith efforts to probe and be transparent about its significant errors during the incident.

Every Israeli woman who is being held captive by Hamas in Gaza is being sexually abused, freed hostage Maya Regev said during an emergency debate in the Knesset's Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality on the situation of the women hostages.

Regev, who was freed during the hostage deal between Israel and Hamas in November, said that it was "unbelievable" that the Knesset was planning on going on recess on April 8 for over five weeks.

"Every day there is an emergency and every minute counts. What will the women do there? What will the rest of the captives do there?" Regev said.

Israel is operating all over the Middle East to exact a price from those who threaten it, the country's defense minister said on Tuesday, though he did not refer directly to a suspected Israeli strike against a group of Iranian officers in Damascus.

"We are currently in a multi-front war – we see evidence of this every day, including over the last few days," Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told a parliamentary committee, according to a statement from his office.

"We operate everywhere, every day, in order to prevent our enemies from gaining strength and in order to make it clear to anyone who threatens us – all over the Middle East – that the price for such action will be a big one."

The European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United Nations all condemned the IDF airstrike that killed seven aid workers from celebrity chef Jose Andres’s World Central Kitchen in central Gaza early Tuesday morning.

“I condemn the attack and urge an investigation,” EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell wrote in a post on X.

“Despite all the demands to protect civilians and humanitarian workers, we see new innocent casualties,” he stated.

The attack comes amid heightened international concern over the possibility of famine in Gaza and changes that Israel has failed to safely ensure the distribution of food in Gaza.

World Central Kitchen is one of the non-governmental agencies that worked to help deliver food to the more than 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.

Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari pledged to immediately investigate the “tragic deaths of the aid workers” as they “fulfilled the vital mission of bringing food to people in need.”

Former IDF intelligence chief Amos Malka on Tuesday said that the October 7 failure was caused by a mix of the defense and political establishment’s obsession with the tunnel threat, the “traffic jam” blocking intelligence points from reaching top officials, and the harm of the legal overhaul to the IDF’s strength.

Malka said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu essentially presented in 2017 to the Knesset Comptroller Committee the threat of a Hamas invasion along the lines of Hamas’s “Walls of Jericho” battle plan, which Israel later intercepted.

However, when Netanyahu presented a Hamas invasion, it was based on the idea of carrying out the invasion using tunnel warfare.