The Israeli army announced on Sunday that Sergeant Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld, 20, was killed by an explosive device in northern Gaza.
Rosenfeld, from Ra’anana, served in the Combat Engineering Battalion.
The Jerusalem District Court on Sunday granted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s request to cancel his scheduled testimony in his corruption trial for the coming week, but ruled it was too early to determine whether testimony should also be canceled for the following week.
The decision followed an initial rejection by the court on Friday and came after a closed-door hearing attended by IDF Intelligence Chief Maj. Gen. Shlomi Binder and Mossad Director David Barnea.
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Following a government decision to stop funding alternative housing for residents of all Gaza border communities, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said Sunday that if there’s no impediment to living near the border, there’s “no impediment to finishing the fighting in Gaza.”
“The government proved today once more what most of the public already knows: the mission of defeating Hamas has been completed,” the forum said. “Israel has succeeded in removing the real threat from the Gaza Strip to Israel, and fulfilled its security goals.”
The forum called for a “comprehensive agreement” to return all 50 hostages, and added that only when they are brought back, “will there be a true national revival.”
After ending his boasting about the success of the attack on the nuclear installation in Fordow and after ceasing to be insulted by the Iranian regime and to threaten it, Donald Trump returned to prophesying an imminent hostage deal between Israel and Hamas. “It’s a terrible situation” in Gaza,” the U.S. president said Friday. “I think it’s close,” he told reporters. “We think within the next week, we’re going to get a cease-fire.” Continuing, he said, “In theory, we’re not involved in” what’s happening in the Strip, “but we’re involved. People are dying.”
The only person who knows whether there is any substance to these statements is Trump himself, presumably. Ever since winning the presidential election in November, he has spoken often, with optimism, about the chances of reaching a deal. On one occasion, a few days before his inauguration in January, he managed to impose an agreement on the two sides. But in March, Israel violated the cease-fire with Hamas, and the deal collapsed; the negotiations have been deadlocked ever since.
Trump still holds the cards. If he exerts sufficient pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu, in the wake of the achievements he helped the prime minister obtain over the past two weeks, there could be a breakthrough. It’s doubtful anything will move without the president’s direct involvement.
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The government has decided to stop funding alternative housing for residents of all Gaza border communities starting July 31, claiming there are no longer security concerns regarding their return home.
Communities with a “rehabilitative impediment” to the return of residents have been excluded from the decision.
The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza said that in the past 24 hours, 88 people were killed in the Strip, including two bodies that were recovered, and 365 were wounded.
According to the ministry, since October 7, a total of 56,500 people have been killed in the Strip and 133,419 have been injured. Since the cease-fire’s collapse in March, 18, 6,175 people have been killed and 21,378 have been wounded.
The Shin Bet security service arrested a terrorist involved in the 2010 shooting attack in the West Bank that killed four Israelis: Yitzhak and Tali Ames, Kochava Even Chaim, and Avishai Shindler.
The arrest was part of a three-month-long, joint operation with the IDF targeting Hamas terror cells in the West Bank, in which over 60 operatives were arrested, and approximately 10 terror cells planning attacks were foiled. Other individuals involved in the 2010 attack were also arrested.
In addition, several Palestinians were arrested who, according to the Shin Bet, were involved in supplying the weapons used in an attack near Jerusalem at the Tunnel Checkpoint in November 2023 that killed Corporal Avraham Fetena.
According to a senior Shin Bet official, “This is the largest and most complex investigation the Shin Bet has thwarted in the West Bank in the past decade. Most members of the network had previously served time in Israeli prison.”
Israel’s state prosecution said that it indicted Dennis Lyakhov, 30, from the central Israeli city of Rishon Letzion, for committing national security offenses including contact with a foreign agent and providing information an enemy
state.
The prosecution requested that the court extend the defendant’s detention until legal proceedings are completed.
According to the indictment, Lyakhov was in contact with an Iranian agent who reached out to him via Telegram and, at the agent’s request and under his guidance, carried out various tasks in exchange for payment.
The prosecution stated that “the defendant was instructed by the Iranian agent to go to Petah Tikva, film a street and residential buildings, send the footage to the agent, and share his location via Telegram,” adding that “the defendant filmed the wrong street and buildings from the address given by the agent, shared his location via Telegram with the enemy, and received money in return.”
The indictment also states that the agent instructed Lyakhov to go to a car dealership in Netanya and inquire about the prices of seven different vehicles, while documenting the process on video.
Although the agent sent Lyakhov money as payment for the mission, he did not carry it out. The prosecution noted that some of the actions were carried out by the defendant while he was in Israel, and others while he was living in Latvia.
Senior Hamas official Mahmoud Mardawi said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is proposing impossible conditions aimed at thwarting the possibility of reaching a cease-fire agreement and a hostage deal, and is refusing to commit to components of the agreement that he had already approved in the past.
On his Telegram channel, Mardawi wrote that the prime minister insists on releasing only ten hostages, instead of releasing all the hostages in one phase. “Netanyahu is lying when he claims he is not involved in choosing the names of the hostages [to be released in the deal],” he wrote. “He does not want a deal.”
Here are the latest updates on day 632 of the war:
■ U.S. President Donald Trump expanded his attacks on the State of Israel over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial, warning that the $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military assistance to Israel may be compromised unless the charges are dismissed.
■ U.S. President Donald Trump, in a post on Truth Social, called for the release of hostages and the end to the Israel-Gaza war.
■ The IDF issued evacuation orders for north Gaza residents of Jabalia and Gaza City, as well as several other neighborhoods in the area.
■ Israel’s attack on the notorious Evin Prison in Iran’s capital Tehran on June 23 killed 71 people, Iranian judiciary spokesperson Asghar Jahangir said on Sunday.
■ The IDF and Shin Bet security service said they had “eliminated the terrorist Hakham Muhammad Al-Issa,” a founding member of Hamas’ armed wing, and “played a significant role in the planning and execution of the brutal October 7th massacre.”
■ The IDF carried out artillery strikes targeting areas near southern Gaza’s Rafah, according to Palestinian reports. Reports also say that the IDF carried out airstrikes in southern Gaza’s Khan Yunis.
■ Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that he condemns the settlers who attacked IDF reservists in the West Bank on Friday. “The State of Israel is a law-abiding nation and no one may take the law into their own hands,” he said.
■ Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich condemned settler riots that took place overnight into Saturday and an incident of IDF soldiers shooting at settlers who were involved in riots and attacked reservists in the West Bank.
■ The IDF announced that it killed an intelligence operative in Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, Abbas Al-Hassan Wahbi who was engaged in efforts to transfer weapons and rehabilitate Hezbollah, in violation of the cease-fire with Lebanon.
