Death toll in Israeli air attacks across the Gaza Strip increased to 38 on Wednesday, medics said, with most of the killings reported in a strike on a house in Beit Lahiya on the northern edge of the enclave.

The Beit Lahiya strike killed at least 22 people, including women and children, health officials said. Relatives listed the names of the dead on social media.

More than 30 people were living in the multi-storey building before it was struck, and several family members remained missing as rescue operations continued through the morning, the Palestinian WAFA news agency said.

The Israeli military told Reuters it had carried out a strike targeting Hamas fighters near the Kamal Adwan Hospital, which is located between Beit Lahiya and Jabalia, towns on the northern fringe of Gaza under Israeli siege for two months.

It said it was continuing to examine the incident but described the number of fatalities reported by Palestinian medics and media as “inaccurate” and at odds with the army’s information.

In nearby Beit Hanoun, also part of the area under siege, medics said an Israeli airstrike killed and wounded several people, without giving an exact toll. Rescue workers said several people were trapped under rubble.

Earlier on Wednesday, at least seven Palestinians were killed and several others wounded in an Israeli airstrike on a house in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, medics told Reuters.

The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service and medics said nine other people were killed in three separate Israeli airstrikes on two houses and a crowd in Gaza City, including journalist Eman Al-Shanti, her husband, and three of their children.

Al-Shanti was the 193rd journalist killed by Israel since the start of the Gaza war in October 2023, the Palestinian Union of Journalists said.

TWO HAMAS COMMANDERS KILLED, ISRAEL CLAIMS

In a statement, the Israeli military said it killed in separate airstrikes two senior, armed Hamas commanders who had taken a leading role in the Oct 7, 2023 cross-border attack on Israel that triggered the war.

It said one of the two, Fahmi Selmi, was a senior elite unit commander in Hamas whom it said had operated from inside a former school in Gaza City’s Zeitoun suburb at the time of the airstrike, whose timing it did not disclose.

The military said the second man, Salah Dahman, had served as the head of Hamas’ paragliding unit in the Jabalia area, had been killed in an airstrike last week.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Israeli military said two rockets had been fired from the central Gaza Strip into Israel but fell in open areas and caused no injuries.

The rocket salvo demonstrated the ability of Gaza militants to continue to stage rocket attacks despite 14 months of devastating Israeli aerial and ground offensives.

Citing rocket launches from the area, the Israeli military ordered residents in the Al-Maghazi camp in central Gaza to evacuate. It urged them to head towards a humanitarian-designated zone near the Mediterranean coast.

Palestinian and United Nations officials say there are no safe areas in the widely devastated territory. Israel says harm to civilians is a consequence of Palestinian militants hiding among them, an accusation Hamas denies.

Fighting has focused on the densely urbanised north, where Israeli armoured forces have been operating in Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya and Jabalia since Oct. 5.

Israel says it is fighting to prevent Hamas militants regrouping and resuming attacks from those areas. Palestinian officials and residents accuse Israel of seeking to depopulate the area to create a buffer zone along the northern end of the coastal territory, which Israel denies.

Israel and Hamas have been waging war since Hamas-led militants carried out a lightning cross-border incursion into southwestern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

The attack triggered Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, which has killed more than 44,800 Palestinians and displaced most of the 2.3 million population, Gaza health authorities say.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said he would “fight to the end” on Thursday as his own political party shifted closer to voting with the opposition to impeach him over his short-lived martial law order that threw the US ally into turmoil.

In a lengthy televised address the embattled leader of Asia’s fourth-largest economy also claimed North Korea had hacked South Korea’s election commission, throwing doubt on his party’s landslide election defeat in April.

Yoon is hoping his political allies will rally to his support but this appeared less likely after his fiery address, with the leader of his ruling People Power Party (PPP) responding that the time had come for Yoon to resign or be impeached by parliament.

Yoon said the opposition was “dancing the sword dance of madness” by trying to drag a democratically elected president from power, nine days after his aborted attempt to grant sweeping powers to the military.

“I will fight to the end,” he said. “Whether they impeach me or investigate me, I will face it all squarely.”

His comments were the first since he apologised on Saturday and promised to leave his fate in the hands of his political allies.

Yoon faces a second impeachment vote in parliament expected on Saturday, a week after the first one failed because most of the ruling PPP boycotted the proceedings.

In the latest sign that Yoon is losing his grip on power, PPP leader Han Dong-hoon told a meeting of party members on Thursday that they should join the opposition to impeach the president.

“I propose we adopt a vote for impeachment as party policy … His address was akin to confessing to insurrection,” he said after watching Yoon’s televised remarks.

Another PPP lawmaker, Jin Jong-oh, publicly declared support for impeachment on Thursday, bringing the total number to seven, YTN television reported. At least eight PPP lawmakers are needed for the two-thirds majority required to impeach Yoon.

Even so, the party remains deeply divided and Yoon continues to have the backing of many PPP lawmakers.

Underscoring the divisions, the party chose a veteran lawmaker politically close to the president as its leader in the assembly by a majority vote on Thursday. Kweon Seong-dong said after his selection the party’s official policy is to oppose impeachment.

A vote to impeach would send the case to the Constitutional Court to determine the legitimacy of Yoon’s presidency, a process that could leave the country in political limbo for up to six months.

The president is also under criminal investigation for alleged insurrection over the Dec. 3 martial law declaration, which he rescinded hours later, sparking the biggest political crisis in South Korea in decades.

In comments that echoed his justification for declaring emergency rule in the first place, Yoon said the “criminal groups” that have paralysed state affairs and disrupted the rule of law must be stopped at all costs from taking over government.

He was referring to the opposition Democratic Party which has blocked some of his proposals and raised allegations of government wrongdoing, but he gave no evidence of criminal activity.

A member of the Democratic Party leadership, Kim Min-seok, said Yoon’s address was a “display of extreme delusion” and called on members of the president’s ruling party to vote to impeach him.

NORTH KOREAN HACK

Yoon spoke at length about an alleged hack by communist-ruled North Korea into the National Election Commission (NEC) last year, again without citing evidence.

He said the attack was detected by intelligence agents but the commission, an independent agency, refused to cooperate fully in an investigation and inspection of its system.

The hack cast doubt on the integrity of the April 2024 election – which his party lost in a landslide – and led him to declare martial law, he added.

The NEC said it had consulted with the National Intelligence Service last year to address “security vulnerabilities” but manipulating elections was “effectively impossible.”

Troops entered the election commission’s computer server room after Yoon’s martial law declaration, officials said and closed-circuit TV footage showed, but it was not clear if they removed any equipment.

Yoon’s party suffered a crushing defeat in the April election, allowing the Democratic Party to have overwhelming control of the single-chamber assembly.

Even so, the opposition still needs eight PPP members to vote with them for the president to be impeached.

Yoon defended his decision to declare martial law as a “symbolic” move intended to expose an opposition plot to “completely destroy the country” and collapse the alliance with the United States.

Israel’s arrest of almost 30 mostly Jewish citizens who allegedly spied for Iran in nine covert cells has caused alarm in the country and points to Tehran’s biggest effort in decades to infiltrate its arch foe, four Israeli security sources said.

Among the unfulfilled goals of the alleged cells was the assassination of an Israeli nuclear scientist and former military officials, while one group gathered information on military bases and air defences, security service Shin Bet has said. Last week, the agency and Israel’s police said a father and son team had passed on details of Israeli force movements including in the Golan Heights where they lived.

The arrests follow repeated efforts by Iranian intelligence operatives over the past two years to recruit ordinary Israelis to gather intelligence and carry out attacks in exchange for money, the four serving and former military and security officials said.

The sources asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter.

“There is a large phenomenon here,” said Shalom Ben Hanan, a former top Shin Bet official, referring to what he called the surprising number of Jewish citizens who knowingly agreed to work for Iran against the state with intelligence gathering or planning sabotage and attacks.

Shin Bet and the police did not respond to requests for comment. Iran’s foreign ministry did not respond to questions.

In a statement sent to media after the wave of arrests, Iran’s UN mission did not confirm or deny seeking to recruit Israelis and said that “from a logical standpoint” any such efforts by Iranian intelligence services would focus on non-Iranian and non-Muslim individuals to lessen suspicion.

At least two suspects were from Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, police and the Shin Bet have said.

Unlike Iranian espionage operations in previous decades that recruited a high-profile businessman and a former cabinet minister, the new alleged spies were largely people on the fringes of Israeli society, including recent immigrants, an army deserter and a convicted sex offender, conversations with the sources, court records and official statements show.

Much of their activity was limited to spraying anti-Netanyahu or anti-government graffiti on walls and damaging cars, Shin Bet has said.

Nonetheless, the scale of the arrests and involvement of so many Jewish Israelis, in addition to Arab citizens, has caused concern in Israel at a time it remains at war with Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza and that a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah remains fragile.

Shin Bet on Oct. 21 said the espionage activities were “among the most severe the state of Israel has known.”

The arrests also follow a wave of attempted hits and kidnappings linked to Tehran in Europe and the United States.

The unusual decision to provide detailed public accounts of the alleged plots was a move by Israel’s security services to signal both to Iran and potential saboteurs inside Israel that they would be caught, Ben Hanan said.

“You want to alert the public. And you also want to make an example of people that may also have intentions or plans to co-operate with the enemy,” he said.

Israel has achieved major intelligence successes over the past few years in a shadow war with its regional foe, including allegedly killing a top nuclear scientist. With the recent arrests Israel has “so far” thwarted Tehran’s efforts to respond, one active military official said.

Iran has been weakened by Israel’s attacks on its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the related fall of Tehran’s ally, former president Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

SOCIAL MEDIA RECRUITS

Iranian intelligence agencies often find potential recruits on social media platforms, Israeli police said in a video released in November warning of ongoing infiltration attempts.

The recruiting efforts are at times direct. One message sent to an Israeli civilian and seen by Reuters promised $15,000 in exchange for information, with an email and number to call.

Iran has also approached expatriate networks of Jews from Caucasus countries living in Canada and the United States, said one of the sources, a former senior official who worked on Israel’s counter espionage efforts until 2007.

Israeli authorities have said publicly some of the Jewish suspects were originally from Caucasus countries.

Recruited individuals are first assigned innocuous-seeming tasks in return for money, before handlers gradually demand specific intelligence on targets, including about individuals and sensitive military infrastructure, backed by the threat of blackmail, said the former official.

One Israeli suspect, Vladislav Victorsson, 30, was arrested on Oct. 14 along with his 18-year-old girlfriend in the Israeli city of Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv. He had been jailed in 2015 for sex with minors as young as 14, according to a court indictment from that time.

An acquaintance of Victorsson told Reuters he had told her he had spoken to Iranians using the Telegram messaging app. She said that Victorsson had lied to his handlers about his military experience. The acquaintance declined to be named, citing safety fears.

Igal Dotan, Victorsson’s lawyer, told Reuters he was representing the suspect, adding that the legal process would take time and that his client was being held in tough conditions. Dotan said he could only respond to the current case and had not defended Victorsson in earlier trials.

Shin Bet and police said Victorsson knew he was working for Iranian intelligence, carrying out tasks including spraying graffiti, hiding money, posting flyers and burning cars in the Hayarkon Park in Tel Aviv for which he received over $5,000.

According to the investigation made public by the security services, he was found to have subsequently agreed to carry out an assassination of an Israeli personality, throw a grenade into a house and also look to obtain a sniper rifle, pistols and fragmentation grenades.

He recruited his girlfriend, who was tasked with recruiting homeless people to photograph demonstrations, the security services said.