Israel announces partial withdrawal of troops from Gaza

Israel has started pulling troops out of Gaza in the first stage of a process expected to last throughout January, as Israel gradually shifts to the next stage of the war.

Stage 1, the intense aerial and artillery bombardment of Gaza, began after the surprise Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7th. Stage 2 began with the ground invasion on October 27th. Stage 3, beginning this month, will see the bulk of troops withdraw from the coastal enclave with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) relying on air strikes and pinpoint cross-border incursions to ensure Hamas does not re-establish itself as a military threat.

“The IDF must plan ahead out of an understanding that there will be additional missions and the fighting will continue the rest of the year,” said IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari.

The decision to withdraw four army brigades came after a significant reduction in the scope of fighting in northern Gaza. Weeks of fighting has decimated Hamas’s resistance, although one neighbourhood, Deraj Tufah, has still not been conquered.

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At the same time, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant announced that Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, would remain the site of intensive fighting until all militant infrastructure in the city is destroyed, the hostages are located and top Hamas officials are killed.

The Hamas-run health ministry reported on Monday that 22,000 people have been killed in the war to date.1,200 people were killed and 250 kidnapped when some 2,000 Hamas fighters entered 22 communities in southern Israel on October 7th.

Thousands of doses of vaccines against childhood diseases, including polio and measles, have entered the Gaza Strip to help combat a growing health emergency in the besieged enclave, the Palestinian health ministry said on Monday. However, local health officials cautioned that administering the vaccines would be difficult because most of Gaza’s population had been driven from their homes, with hundreds of thousands living in tents and other temporary accommodation.

The United Nations says 85% of Gaza’s 2.4 million people – almost two million – have now been displaced.

The Israeli authorities also announced on Monday that communities living between 4-7 kilometres (2.4-4.3 miles) from the Gaza border, who were evacuated at the war’s outbreak, can now return to their homes

Despite a significant decrease in rocket fire from Gaza as the war progressed, militants still managed to fire a salvo of rockets at Tel Aviv at midnight on Sunday, as Israelis welcomed in the new year.

A total of 129 hostages, alive and dead, remain in Hamas captivity in Gaza. Contacts continue to try to establish a new deal involving a truce and the freeing of Palestinian security prisoners in return for the release of more hostages. A Hamas delegation is currently in Cairo, meeting Egyptian mediators, but Hamas, at least publicly, insists there can only be a deal if Israel ends the war.

ABC News reported that the USS Gerald R Ford aircraft carrier strike group, which was sent to the Mediterranean Sea just after the Israel-Hamas war began, will be leaving in the coming days.

In a separate development on Monday night, Israel’s supreme court struck down a controversial judicial reform that triggered nationwide protests last year against Mr Netanyahu’s government. Eight justices on the 15-member panel voted to annul the so-called reasonableness law, which prevented the court overruling government decisions based on their “reasonableness”.

The dramatic development marked the first time in Israel’s history that the judiciary has overturned a quasi-constitutional Basic Law. Government ministers said they would examine ways to reintroduce the legislation once the war was over.

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