JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday threatened to withdraw from the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and resume its fight against Hamas if the militant group does not go ahead with the next scheduled release of hostages on Saturday.
Hamas said Monday — and reiterated Tuesday — that it planned to delay the release of three more hostages after accusing Israel of failing to meet the terms of the ceasefire, including by not allowing enough tents and other aid into Gaza.
US President Donald Trump has emboldened Israel to call for the release of even more remaining hostages on Saturday, but it wasn’t immediately clear whether Netanyahu’s threat referred to the release of all remaining hostages in Gaza, or just the three scheduled for release on Saturday.
Earlier Tuesday, an Israeli official said Netanyahu ordered the army to add more troops in and around the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu also ordered officials “to prepare for every scenario if Hamas doesn’t release our hostages this Saturday,” according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting.
Israel had signaled Monday it planned to reinforce defenses along the Gaza border. The all-scenario plan was announced during a four-hour meeting between Netanyahu and his Security Cabinet that focused on Hamas’ threat, which risks jeopardizing the three-week-old ceasefire.
So far, Hamas has released 21 hostages in a series of exchanges for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
President Donald Trump has said Israel should cancel the entire ceasefire if all of the roughly 70 hostages aren’t freed by Saturday. Hamas brushed off his threat on Tuesday, doubling down on its claim that Israel has violated the ceasefire and warned that it would only continue releasing hostages if all parties adhered to the ceasefire.
Trump is hosting Jordan’s King Abdullah II at the White House on Tuesday as he escalates pressure on the Arab nation to take in refugees from Gaza — perhaps permanently — as part of his audacious plan to remake the Middle East.
Palestinians and the international community have seethed over Trump’s recent comments that any Palestinians potentially expelled from Gaza would not have a right to return.
During the first six-week phase of the ceasefire, Hamas committed to freeing 33 hostages captured in its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, while Israel said it would release nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. The sides have carried out five swaps since Jan. 19.
The war could resume in early March if no agreement is reached on the more complicated second phase of the ceasefire, which calls for the return of all remaining hostages and an indefinite extension of the truce.
But if Israel resumes the war, it will face a drastically different battlefield. After forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to evacuate to southern Gaza in the early stages of the war, Israel allowed many of those displaced people to return to what is left of their homes, posing a new challenge to its ability to move ground troops through the territory.
Netanyahu threatens to resume fighting in Gaza if hostages aren’t released Saturday
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Netanyahu threatens to resume fighting in Gaza if hostages aren’t released Saturday

- War could resume in early March if no agreement is reached on the more complicated second phase of the ceasefire
Yemen Houthi rebel media accuse US of attacking airport
SANAA: Houthi militant media in Yemen accused the United States Saturday of attacking the airport in Hodeida, the latest such claim since Washington announced heavy strikes against the rebels one week ago.
Al-Masirah TV, blaming “American aggression,” said three attacks had targeted the airport in Hodeida on the Red Sea coast.
Between Wednesday and Friday the Iran-backed militants’ television channel made similar accusations, after United States Central Command on Wednesday confirmed “continuous operations” against the militants and President Donald Trump said they will be “annihilated.”
On March 15 the United States announced a wave of air strikes that officials said killed senior Houthi leaders, and which the militants’ health ministry said killed 53 people.
The strikes, the first since Trump resumed office, came after the militants threatened to renew attacks on Israeli shipping.
On Khartoum front line, Sudan women medics risk all for patients

- Their operating theaters were turned into battlegrounds, their hospitals bombed, and their colleagues killed where they stood. Yet through bombs and bullets, they turned up for their patients every day
OMDURMAN: When fighting first gripped the Sudanese capital in April 2023, quickly overwhelming Khartoum’s hospitals, Dr. Safaa Ali faced an impossible choice: her family or her patients.
She said she stayed up all night before deciding not to follow her husband to Egypt with her four children.
“I was torn. I could either be with my children or stay and do my duty,” she said.
She has not seen her family since.
Nearly two years into the war between the regular army and the Rapid Support Forces, she is one of the last remaining obstetricians in the capital, risking her life to give Sudanese women a shot at safe births.
We find strength in our love of our country, our passion for our work, and the oath we swore,” she said in a war-damaged delivery room.
Dr. Safaa Ali
“We find strength in our love of our country, our passion for our work, and the oath we swore,” she said in a war-damaged delivery room.
She is one of a cohort of doctors, nurses, technicians, and janitorial staff who met in the last hospitals in Omdurman, Khartoum’s sister city just across the Nile.
Their operating theaters were turned into battlegrounds, their hospitals bombed, and their colleagues killed where they stood. Yet through bombs and bullets, they turned up for their patients every day.
Bothaina Abdelrahman has been a janitor at Omdurman’s Al-Nao hospital for 27 years.
She sheltered with her family in a neighboring district for the first 48 hours of the war but has not missed a day of work since.
“I would walk two hours to the hospital and walk two hours back,” she said at the hospital, mop in hand.
For months, medical personnel have been subjected to routine accusations from combatants that they have been collaborating with the enemy or failing to treat their comrades.
“Health professionals were attacked, kidnapped, killed, and taken hostage for ransom,” said Dr. Khalid Abdelsalam, Khartoum project coordinator for medical charity Doctors Without Borders, or MSF.
Nationwide, up to 90 percent of hospitals in conflict zones have been forced shut, according to Sudan’s doctors’ union, which says at least 78 health workers have been killed since the war began. By October, the World Health Organization had recorded 119 attacks on health facilities.
“At one point, there wasn’t a single working MRI machine in the country” for medical scans, said Abdelsalam.
Despite repeated attacks, Khansa Al-Moatasem heads the 180-person nursing team at Al-Nao, Omdurman’s only hospital functioning throughout the war.
“It’s an honor to give the hospital everything I have and learned,” she said, pink headscarf glowing under the fluorescent lights.
According to MSF, which supports the complex of two-story buildings, Al-Nao has suffered three direct hits since the war began.
A sign reads: “No weapons allowed,” but it frequently goes unheeded at the hospital gates.
After the RSF stormed the nearby maternity hospital early in the war, Dr. Ali, who serves as the hospital’s director, steeled her nerves and went to the paramilitary forces herself.
“I met their field commander and told him this was a women’s hospital, only for them to storm it again the next day with even more fighters,” she recalled.
In July 2023, she watched one of her colleagues die when the hospital was bombed.
Eventually, the hospital was forced to close its doors after its ceilings collapsed, its equipment was looted, and the walls of its delivery rooms were left riddled with bullets.
Dr. Ali set up mobile clinics and a temporary maternity ward at Al-Nao until the Saudi hospital partially reopened this month.
Since army forces recaptured much of Omdurman in early 2024, a semblance of normality has slowly returned, but hospitals have continued to come under attack.
As recently as February, Al-Nao was rocked by RSF shelling as its exhausted doctors raced to treat dozens of casualties from RSF artillery fire on a crowded market.
Those hospitals that still function have been forced to rely increasingly on the help of volunteers from the local Emergency Response Rooms. The neighborhood groups are part of a grassroots aid network delivering frontline aid across Sudan but mainly comprise young Sudanese with few resources.
With no senior physicians left, Dr. Fathia Abdelmajed, a pediatrician for 40 years, has become the “mother” of Al-Buluk Hospital.
For years, she treated patients at home in the Bant neighborhood of Omdurman.
But since November 2023, she has been training teams at the small, overwhelmed hospital, “where hardworking young people were struggling since the start of the war,” Abdelmajed said.
She said the work was often harrowing, but the honor of serving alongside such dedicated volunteers “has made this the highlight of my career.”
Thailand ‘disappointed’ by renewed Gaza hostilities

- Israel has said it will pound the Palestinian territory until Hamas releases the remaining hostages held there, despite many inside Israel believing that this strategy will only endanger the captives’ lives
BANGKOK: Thailand has said it is “disappointed” by the return to hostilities in Gaza and called for the release of hostages, including a Thai national.
Israel on Tuesday began a fresh assault on the war-battered enclave, shattering the relative calm since a Jan. 19 ceasefire.
The strikes, by far the deadliest since the truce took effect in January, have killed more than 500 people, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza.
At least 130 Palestinians were killed and 263 wounded in the past 48 hours of Israel’s offensive on Gaza, the ministry said on Saturday.
“Thailand is profoundly concerned about and disappointed at the return to hostilities in the Gaza Strip,” said a Thai Foreign Ministry statement.
The Southeast Asian nation urged “all sides to exercise utmost restraint, cease the hostilities, and resume negotiations to implement the ceasefire and hostage agreement.”
It called for the release of remaining hostages in Gaza — including one Thai — and the repatriation of the bodies of two Thai nationals.
When Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, 31 Thais were abducted, with 23 released by the end of that year and two confirmed dead in May.
Five more abducted Thais returned home in February following their release as part of the January ceasefire, with one Thai national still believed to be alive in Gaza. Israel has said it will pound the Palestinian territory until Hamas releases the remaining hostages held there, despite many inside Israel believing that this strategy will only endanger the captives’ lives.
Ghassan Al-Khatib, a Palestinian political analyst and former Palestinian Authority minister, believes Hamas will only release hostages if it is given guarantees that Israel will uphold the terms of the stalled January ceasefire.
“If the hostages are released under the pressure of the Israeli attacks, then Hamas will be (left) with no guarantees,” he said.
“Hamas will not trust any word from Israel, but the guarantees should come from third parties” such as mediators Egypt, the US or Qatar, Al-Khatib added.
The governments of Germany, France and Britain called for an immediate return to a ceasefire in Gaza in a joint statement that also called on Israel to restore humanitarian access.
“We call on Israel to restore humanitarian access, including water and electricity, and ensure access to medical care and temporary medical evacuations in accordance with international humanitarian law,” the foreign ministers of the three countries, known as the E3, said in a statement.
The ministers said they were “appalled by the civilian casualties,” and also called on Palestinian Hamas militants to release Israeli hostages.
They said the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians could not be resolved through military means, and that a long-lasting ceasefire was the only credible pathway to peace.
The ministers added that they were “deeply shocked” by the incident that affected the UN Office for Project Services, UNOPS, building in Gaza, and called for an investigation into the incident.
Israel anti-government protests flare after dismissal of top security agency chief

- Protesters waved blue and white Israeli flags and called for a deal that would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages being held in Gaza
- “The most dangerous enemy of Israel is Benjamin Netanyahu,” protester Moshe Haaharony
TEL AVIV: Thousands of Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv on Saturday against the decision by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to dismiss the head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service and resume fighting in Gaza.
Netanyahu said this week he had lost confidence in Ronen Bar, who has led Shin Bet since 2021, and intended to fire him effective April 10, prompting three days of protests.
Israel’s Supreme Court issued an injunction on Friday temporarily freezing the dismissal.
Netanyahu has dismissed accusations the decision was politically motivated, but his critics have accused him of undermining the institutions underpinning Israel’s democracy by seeking Bar’s removal.
Israel returned to war in Gaza this week, shattering a ceasefire that saw the exchange of hostages being held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails and brought respite to the battered enclave.
In Tel Aviv’s Habima Square, protesters waved blue and white Israeli flags and called for a deal that would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages being held in Gaza.
“The most dangerous enemy of Israel is Benjamin Netanyahu,” protester Moshe Haaharony, 63, told Reuters. “Benjamin Netanyahu, for 20 years, doesn’t care about the country, doesn’t care about the citizens.”
Since the start of the war, there have also been regular protests by families and supporters of hostages seized by Hamas during the October 7 attack that have sometimes echoed the criticisms of the government.
“We are a year and a half later after we had very fierce fighting in Gaza and Hamas is still in power,” protester Erez Berman, 44, told Reuters. “It still has tens of thousands of fighters. So the Israeli government actually failed in getting its own goals out of the war.”
With the resumption of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the fate of 59 hostages, as many as 24 of whom are still believed to be alive, remains unclear and protesters said a return to war could see them either killed by their captors or accidentally by Israeli bombardments.
“We’re going to do whatever it takes to bring the hostages home,” Ophir Falk, Netanyahu’s foreign policy adviser, told Reuters.
“Hamas unfortunately understands military pressure, and only military pressure. In November 2023 we got over 80 hostages out for one reason, military pressure... The only reason they went back to the negotiating table was military pressure. And that’s what we’re doing right now,” Falk said.
US embassy in Israel warns Americans there to be on guard

- “The security environment is complex and can change quickly,” the embassy said
WASHINGTON: The US embassy in Israel on Saturday warned Americans there to avoid large gatherings and be prepared to seek shelter following an escalation of conflict in the country.
“The security environment is complex and can change quickly,” the embassy said in an alert posted on its website. “Be aware of your surroundings.”
The warning came as the Israeli army said it was attacking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon in a second wave of strikes, after intercepting rockets fired from across the border earlier in the day.
Israel has also seen a series of large protests in recent days over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to dismiss the head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service.