Israel said on Saturday it attempted to kill Hamas’s top leader in the Gaza Strip, Ali al-Amoudi, in an airstrike on an apartment. Local officials say the strike killed five people, and an official at Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital told AFP it received at dawn the bodies of five people and a number of injured in the Rimal neighbourhood. The Israeli military said it aimed to kill al-Amoudi, describing him as the right-hand man of slain Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar and saying he was involved in planning the October 7 attack.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is preparing a potential case at the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seeking to use it as leverage in their escalating dispute, according to i24NEWS, cited by RT. According to RT, Netanyahu reportedly instructed an Israeli interministerial team and the head of Israel’s International Law Department to prepare a dossier focused primarily on alleged attacks against Kurdish minorities, along with accusations that Erdogan’s government finances Hamas. The move would follow Türkiye’s request last month for an Interpol Red Notice for Netanyahu, after a Turkish court issued an arrest warrant on charges including genocide over Israel’s interception of the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla earlier this year.
Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya told Qatari station Al-Araby that the Israeli election will not change anything for the Palestinians and that “our people have suffered at the hands of all Israeli parties”, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP), in a text republished by the South China Morning Post. He said Hamas refuses to allow the blood, suffering and cause of the Palestinian people to serve as fuel for Israeli elections. The election in Israel is set for October 27.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office called ‘grotesque absurdity’ French President Emmanuel Macron’s claim at the UN General Assembly that Hamas has never operated in the West Bank, according to Agence France-Presse, carried by Channel NewsAsia. The Israeli statement said Hamas militants attack Jews in Judea and Samaria, the Israeli name for the West Bank, ‘almost every day’ and that ‘ignorance is no excuse for erasing their blood’. The Jerusalem Post reports that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich accused Macron of lying and cited the killing of a French-Israeli father of six in an attack attributed to Hamas in the West Bank on Sunday, September 20, 2026, two days before the speech. Macron spoke in French, and published renderings of his remark vary between ‘never operated’ and ‘never caused trouble’ in the West Bank; he criticised daily violations in the territory and called the humanitarian situation in Gaza ‘a spectacle that shames us all’.
An Israeli air strike hit al-Khiam, in southern Lebanon, overnight into Wednesday, 23 September 2026, damaging transmission lines and cutting power to the entire Nabaa el-Hamas area, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA), cited by Middle East Eye. A large explosion in al-Khiam, in the Nabatieh governorate, was felt across southern Lebanon, the agency reported. On Tuesday, 22 September, Israeli artillery struck the towns of Al-Mansouri and Baraachit, and Israeli forces advanced on Al-Mansouri with military vehicles and bulldozers, detonating houses in the town’s Fourth Neighbourhood that had been rigged with explosives, according to NNA.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, criticised French President Emmanuel Macron’s claim at the United Nations General Assembly that Hamas has never operated in the West Bank. “The grotesque absurdity of Emmanuel Macron’s statement is staggering,” the statement said, as carried by Middle East Eye and the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS).
The statement cites the killing of Netanel Shukrun, a French citizen and father of six, who it says was shot dead in his car by a “Hamas terrorist” on Sunday, 20 September 2026, the eve of Yom Kippur, in the occupied West Bank — the region the Israeli government calls Judea and Samaria. “With his final breath, he told his son to run,” it says. “Hamas terrorists carry out attacks against Jews almost every day. They have murdered countless Israeli civilians in Judea and Samaria.”
Macron had called the scenes in Gaza “shameful. A shame for all of us”, and said that “all those who claim that Israel’s security requires violating the sovereignty of all its neighbours are making a fatal mistake”, according to Middle East Eye. Netanyahu is expected to address the UN on Thursday, 24 September 2026.
According to the UN’s official record of the debate and Middle East Eye, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opened the general debate of the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) saying that “generations of Palestinians will carry the pain and trauma left by the genocide of women and children perpetrated by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Gaza.” In the same speech, on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, Lula said that “Israeli civilians paid the price for the radicalism and intolerance of Hamas’ terrorist acts” and that illegal settlements in the West Bank are making a two-state solution increasingly unviable, according to The New Republic. He criticised the persecution of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its members and said that the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, must not be “silenced for telling the truth,” according to Al Jazeera, The New Republic and Israel Hayom.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video posted on X on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, that he will use his address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, scheduled for Thursday, September 24, to defend the country’s soldiers and to “tell the truth” about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom he accused of supporting Hamas and of inciting riots against the city’s Jews, according to The Jerusalem Post and The Times of India. “Shame on you, Mr. Mamdani,” Netanyahu said. “Shame on you for supporting the Hamas terrorist monsters who butchered our people.” The statement answers a CNN interview aired on Monday, September 21, in which Mamdani again called Netanyahu “a war criminal and an architect of a horrific genocide of the Palestinian people” and said the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against the prime minister should be honored.
Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that Gaza City will be evacuated and destroyed if a single Israeli is abducted, and that the military will not make partial withdrawals from the 63% of the territory it holds until Hamas is disarmed. He spoke at the Yom Kippur War memorial in Jerusalem, according to Agence France-Presse, The Jerusalem Post and i24NEWS. “If a single Israeli soldier or civilian is kidnapped, the entire city of Gaza, with its houses and terror towers, will be evacuated southward with its million residents,” Katz said, addressing the warning to Hamas and, explicitly, to the governments of Iran and Turkey. Gaza City’s municipality puts its population at about 1.1 million.