In northern Gaza, there were more battles between Hamas and Israeli troops on Wednesday night. Meanwhile, Israel’s northern border with Lebanon saw further exchanges of fire on Thursday, with Hezbollah unleashing a barrage of rockets.

Hezbollah said it launched 48 Katyusha rockets at an Israeli army base near the border with Lebanon, Al-Manar TV reported. It also fired a guided missile at an Israeli tank and attacked an infantry force.

UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron visited Israel on Thursday, meeting his counterpart Eli Cohen as part of a series of planned meetings with Israeli and Palestinian officials. He visited one of the Israeli communities near Gaza in which residents were massacred by Hamas fighters in October.

Latest developments

• Israel’s $48bn war bill leaves it at mercy of bond markets
• Ceasefire won’t end Israel’s war on Hamas but might change it
• Israel, Hamas agree to four-day ceasefire for hostage releases

Four-day pause in fighting starts on Friday – Qatar foreign ministry

Qatar said a short truce in the war between Israel and Hamas would begin on Friday morning, about a day later than initially expected as negotiations between the two sides over hostages and prisoners dragged on.

A four-day pause in fighting in Gaza would start at 7am local time, while a first group of women and children hostages would be released by Hamas at around 4pm, according to Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed Al-Ansari.

Israel and Hamas reached an agreement this week. As well as the truce, Hamas is set to free 50 hostages, while Israel is meant to release 150 jailed Palestinians. All of the 200 will be women and children.

The accord, brokered by Qatar as well as Egypt and the US, was expected to start on Thursday morning, but the delay underscored its complexity and the difficulty of achieving a breakthrough between two warring sides. 

Israel’s $48bn war bill leaves its fate with bond markets

When a team of Israeli technocrats that calls itself the “government’s CFO” scans the battlefield with the war against Hamas almost seven weeks in, it sees an accounting ledger with billions of debits stacking up.

Their job is to find the money to help pay for it all.

As Israel’s military pushed deeper into Gaza with the goal of uprooting Hamas following its 7 October attack, the Finance Ministry’s accountant general department was fine-tuning forecasts and updating the government’s running tab by logging the costs of every missile interceptor, every flight and every day of deployment by reservists.

Those expenses are quickly adding up, even as a hostage deal now holds out the prospect of a four-day pause in the deadly conflict.

The war, which the Finance Ministry estimates is costing the economy around $270-million every day, will come with a fiscal price tag estimated at 180 billion shekels ($48-billion) in 2023-2024, according to Leader Capital Markets, a financial advisory powerhouse in Israel.

Israel will likely be on the hook for two-thirds of the total costs, Leader said, with the US paying for the rest.

Israel’s fiscal math means the government will largely have to borrow its way through what’s already its worst armed conflict in half a century. And the man in charge of managing Israel’s $300-billion debt stock is mindful of the risks.

“We are moving forward with a base case scenario that references several months of combat and have worked in additional buffers,” Yali Rothenberg, the Finance Ministry’s accountant general, said in an interview. “We are well capable of financing the State of Israel even in more extreme scenarios than the current fighting.” 

Although the government has issued international debt in yen, euros and dollars through private placements via Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs Group, it’s counting on the domestic market to absorb the bulk of its financing needs. The Finance Ministry has already sold 18.7 billion shekels of local bonds since 7 October, compared with a monthly average of just over 5 billion shekels through September. 

US Navy warship shoots down drones fired from Yemen rebel zone

A US Navy destroyer in the Red Sea shot down several drones launched from Yemen, where Iran-backed Houthi rebels pledged to keep targeting Israel until its military offensive in the Gaza Strip ends.

The “multiple one-way attack drones” were launched from areas of Yemen controlled by the Houthi rebels, the US Central Command said on Wednesday night in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter. 

The destroyer, the Thomas Hudner, shot down another drone on 15 November that had been “heading in the direction of the ship,” Central Command said at the time. DM

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