Israeli leaders rebuffed mounting pressure to halt the military campaign in the southern Gaza Strip, vowing to press on until Hamas is eradicated even as the death toll rose and the United Nations warned that civilians had no safe harbour amid the bombing.

United Nations chief António Guterres stepped up his calls for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, invoking a rarely used power to press the Security Council over a crisis he said was “fast deteriorating into a catastrophe”. Writing to the Security Council on Wednesday, Guterres said he expected public order in Gaza “to completely break down soon”, preventing even the limited aid delivery that is possible now.

The Biden administration will deny visas to Israeli settlers involved in attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, raising pressure on Israel to tamp down violence that has erupted in the wake of Hamas’s attack in October.

Latest developments

• US will deny visas to Israeli settlers over West Bank attacks
• UN says no safe place in Gaza as about 1,000 killed since truce
• TikTok struggles to take down deepfake videos of Hamas’ victims

No stock trading oddities before Hamas attack, says Israel

Israel’s Securities Authority said it found no significant stock trading abnormalities in the days preceding Hamas’ 7 October attack that warrant further investigation, responding to claims in a US-authored research paper that caused a public uproar.

In an interview on Wednesday with Bloomberg TV, Tel Aviv Stock Exchange Chief Executive Officer Ittai Ben-Zeev added that there were no oddities evident in equity, bond, or derivative trading. The “local market didn’t see anything that’s awkward”, he said.

The securities regulator, known as ISA, opened an investigation into possible suspicious pre-attack trading not long after the deadly incursion took place, it said in a statement on Tuesday. It then re-examined those findings following the publication of a research report on 4 December titled Trading on Terror, written by Robert J Jackson, at New York University School of Law, and Joshua Mitts, at Columbia Law School.

The US-based researchers said they found a “significant spike in short selling in the principal Israeli-company ETF days before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack”, referring to exchange-traded funds popular with investors seeking exposure to a specific region, country or industry. “Our findings suggest that traders informed about the coming attacks profited from these tragic events,” they wrote.

ISA said it’s only responsible for overseeing trading occurring in the country, and therefore its lack of findings “reflect only trading activity in Israel”. It didn’t comment on trading of Israeli securities abroad, which could include US-listed ETFs.

The US authors also said they found a substantial overall increase in short-selling interest in the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, peaking just before the attack. “For one company alone, Bank Leumi Le-Israel, 4.43 million new shares sold short over the Sept. 14 to Oct. 5 period, yielding profits of 3.2 billion shekels ($863 million) on that additional short selling,” they said.

But Yaniv Pagot, head of trading at the stock exchange, said the researchers miscalculated since share prices are listed in agorot, which are similar to cents, rather than shekels, “putting the short-sale profit at just 32 million shekels”.

The authors later corrected their findings to reflect the use of agorot.

Israel rebuffs calls to halt Gaza war as forces move south

Israeli leaders rebuffed mounting pressure to halt the military campaign in the southern Gaza Strip, vowing to press on until Hamas is eradicated even as the death toll rose and the United Nations warned that civilians had no safe harbour amid the bombing.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a briefing with other members of his war Cabinet, said that if the rest of the world wanted the war to end quickly, it had to stand with Israel. He accused international organisations of ignoring what he said were “abhorrent” cases of rape by Hamas fighters during the 7 October incursion that touched off the latest violence.

“Hamas is trying to tear us down and instead we are taking them apart,” Netanyahu said, adding that Israeli forces had killed half of Hamas’s battalion commanders. “We will fight until the end, until a crushing victory.”

The message echoed past arguments that Netanyahu and the Cabinet have made over concerns from the Biden administration and other allies, which have warned that the devastation wrought in north Gaza before a seven-day truce that ended last week must not be repeated in the south. In a post to X on Tuesday, the European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, urged a new pause in the fighting.

While Israel has said it’s taking increased precautions to protect the lives of civilians, the Hamas-run health ministry said on Tuesday that the death toll had risen to some 1,000 people since the truce ended, bringing the number of dead Palestinians since Israel’s counteroffensive began to more than 16,000 people. Israel announced on Tuesday that seven more soldiers had been killed in the latest fighting.

The Israeli military has encircled Khan Younis, the territory’s second-largest city, as it seeks to wipe out Hamas, which set off the war on 7 October after breaching barriers into southern Israel and killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The IDF believes Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif are in the city, according to a report by Axios, citing officials it didn’t identify.

The UN on Tuesday expressed frustration over the civilian deaths. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the message to avoid civilian deaths “hasn’t been very successful, to be completely honest.

“There are no safe places” in Gaza, he said. “There are shelters that fly the UN flag that are sheltering thousands and thousands and thousands of people — men, women, children. Those places that fly the UN flag are not safe, either.”

In his post, the EU’s Borrell said he’d been told the UN wouldn’t be able to operate in south Gaza because of the Israeli bombing. Further underscoring the international scrutiny, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak spoke to Netanyahu on Tuesday and called for more aid to flow into Gaza.

Sunak “expressed disappointment about the breakdown of the pause in fighting in Gaza, which had allowed hostages to be released”, his office said in a readout.

Biden urges all to ‘forcefully condemn’ Hamas rapes, torture

President Joe Biden called on policymakers and international organisations to “forcefully condemn” violent sexual acts committed by Hamas against Israeli hostages, amid criticism of comments by a Democratic congresswoman.

“The world can’t just look away at what’s going on,” Biden said on Tuesday at a political fundraiser in Boston, adding that “it’s on all of us” to “forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation”.

Biden spoke days after Congressional Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal said on CNN that accounts of rape of Israeli women by Hamas were “horrific” but that people must be “balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians”.

Other Democrats expressed outrage with Jayapal’s comments, underscoring divisions within the party over the war between Israel and Hamas.

Jayapal on Tuesday sought to tamp down the controversy.

“I unequivocally condemn Hamas’ use of rape and sexual violence as an act of war,” she said in a post on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Jayapal said her “comment about balance was not about rape, and not intended to minimise rape and sexual assault in any way” but was “about recognizing the tremendous pain and trauma of so many — Israelis, Palestinians and their diaspora communities — in this terrible war”.

Biden on Tuesday recounted “appalling” descriptions by survivors and witnesses of “acts of unimaginable cruelty,” including Israeli women who were raped repeatedly and mutilated by Hamas after being taken by militants following their 7 October assault.

“Hamas terrorists inflicted as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible,” Biden said.

US to deny visas to Israeli settlers over West Bank attacks on Palestinians

The Biden administration will deny visas to Israeli settlers involved in attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, raising pressure on Israel to tamp down violence that has erupted in the wake of Hamas’ attack in October.

The action announced on Tuesday amounts to a rare US punishment directed at Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said it targets people who have “been involved in undermining peace, security, or stability in the West Bank”, meaning it could also apply to Palestinians who attack Israelis.

“We have underscored to the Israeli government the need to do more to hold accountable extremist settlers” who have committed violence there, Blinken said. “We will also continue to engage the Palestinian Authority to make clear it must do more to curb Palestinian attacks against Israelis.”

The restrictions will also apply to close families of the targeted people, Blinken said. The policy will apply to dozens of people and their families, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said. He said any Israeli citizen believed to be involved in attacks would have their visas revoked.

The new policy’s impact may be blunted by the fact many Israeli settlers have US citizenship and don’t need a visa to travel to the US. The Israeli government would need to take its own actions against those not covered by the US’s moves, a senior State Department official told reporters last week. DM

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