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The Times of Israel liveblogged Monday’s events as they unfolded.
A business owner in Ramla was seriously wounded earlier this evening in an apparent criminally motivated shooting, police say.
According to police, officers were dispatched after receiving reports of gunfire at the entrance to a store in the city, with initial indications suggesting the incident occurred during a robbery.
The victim, a resident in his 50s, was evacuated in serious condition to a nearby medical center, medical officials say.
Ramla station officers have launched searches in the area and cordoned off the scene. Police say evidence is being collected and the circumstances are under investigation, with early findings pointing to a criminal background.
Opposition Leader Yair Lapid delivers a fiery address in the Knesset during a so-called 40-signature debate, sharply criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the government’s ultra-Orthodox conscription plan, the handling of the October 7 failures and his recent pardon request.
Speaking minutes after Netanyahu, Lapid is repeatedly interrupted by coalition lawmakers, but presses on, branding the conscription proposal a “draft-dodging law” and accusing the prime minister and his allies of deliberately avoiding committee discussions to distance themselves from the legislation.
Lapid vows the bill will not pass in any form, saying the opposition would fight it by every means.
He mocks the coalition’s push to establish a commission of inquiry into the October 7 attacks, calling it a farce that amounts to “investigating yourselves,” and demands answers on “who was prime minister on October 7, 2023.”
Lapid also issues a blistering personal attack on Netanyahu over his request for a presidential pardon, saying the prime minister should “admit guilt, accept disgrace, and go home,” warning that any alternative would “tear the country apart.”
“Without an admission and without disgrace, it’s not a pardon — it’s a prize. It means that for those with power, the laws simply don’t apply,” he says.
A US official flatly dismisses a “misleading” Financial Times report suggesting that former UK prime minister Tony Blair has been sidelined from the Board of Peace that the US is establishing to oversee the management of Gaza.
While the 20-point plan for ending the Gaza war that US President Donald Trump unveiled in September stated Blair would sit on the board, Washington has since shifted to a different model where the panel will be filled by current heads of state, who will play more symbolic roles while an intermediate level “executive committee” will be more closely involved in overseeing the management of Gaza.
Blair is poised to sit on that committee, along with top Trump aides Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, as well as former UN envoy for Mideast peace Nikolay Mladenov, the US official says.
A woman was killed by an Israeli drone strike on the Halawa area of the Jabalia refugee camp, on the Hamas-controlled side of the Gaza ceasefire line, Al Jazeera reports, citing a source in the emergency services.
The same source says six people were wounded in a strike on a tent belonging to displaced people on the Hamas-controlled side of Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood.
The Palestinian Authority’s official news agency WAFA also reports a man killed in a drone strike on western Deir el-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip. The area is also on the Hamas side of the so-called Yellow Line.
The IDF confirms carrying out the strike in Deir al-Balah but offers no immediate comment on the reported strike in Jabalia.
Israel and Bolivia are restoring diplomatic relations, two years after the South American country severed ties with Jerusalem over the war in Gaza, the Foreign Ministry announces in a statement.
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and his Bolivian counterpart, Fernando Aramayo, will meet tomorrow in Washington DC, where they are expected to sign an agreement to renew relations, the statement reads. Bolivia’s Finance Minister, José Gabriel Espinoza, will also participate in the event.
According to the statement, Sa’ar held a phone call with Bolivia’s President Rodrigo Paz a day after his election this past October, conveying Israel’s desire “to open a new chapter” and fully renew diplomatic relations. In turn, Paz stated his intention “to lead Bolivia toward a reopening to the world and reestablishing ties with Israel.”
In November, the Foreign Ministry’s director-general, Eden Bar-Tal, represented Israel at Paz’s inauguration in Bolivia, the statement adds.
Earlier this month, Bolivia announced the cancellation of its visa requirement for Israeli travelers, and over recent weeks of intensive contacts, the countries finalized the agreement to restore ties, the statement continues.
In 2009, under then-president Evo Morales, Bolivia cut ties with Israel in protest of the 2008-2009 Gaza conflicts. Relations were briefly restored in 2019 after Morales’s resignation, but were severed again on October 31, 2023, by President Luis Arce, over Israel’s wartime conduct in Gaza following the Hamas-led invasion and massacre that same month.
Paz, a center-right candidate, took office this year following years of left-wing governments in Bolivia, heralding a shift in policy toward Jerusalem.
Defense Minister Israel Katz has informed the attorney general that he intends to bring the proposal to shut down Army Radio for government approval within the next two weeks, Hebrew media reports.
Katz is reportedly awaiting the attorney general’s legal opinion and has made clear that he expects to receive it without delay, no later than mid-month, due to what he reportedly describes as a tight schedule.
The development comes as Army Radio head Tal Lev Ram reportedly sent a sharply worded letter to the attorney general criticizing the committee examining the station’s future, alleging significant “flaws” in its work.
According to Hebrew media reports, Lev Ram says the committee concluded — without solid evidence — that the station is politically biased, relying on an employee’s claim that “35 percent of staff identify with right-wing positions and 65% with left-wing positions” — a figure Lev Ram calls “ridiculous” and impossible to verify.
Lev Ram also accuses the committee of pre-determining its conclusions, including claims that current affairs broadcasts “harm soldiers,” and of offering no practical solutions or consideration of the implications of its recommendations.
Last month, Katz announced that he intends to close Army Radio by March 1, 2026, preserving its apolitical sister station Galgalatz for continued operation and establishing a professional team to oversee the closure.
Katz’s plan, which follows years of similar proposals from past defense ministers, is expected to face legal challenges. Lev Ram has vowed to oppose the closure.
President Isaac Herzog is expected to meet this week with several prominent activists opposing Israel’s governmental overhaul, in discussions that will also address Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent pardon request, Haaretz reports, citing sources familiar with the matter.
According to the report, Herzog is expected to try to ease the activists’ opposition to Netanyahu’s request, which he submitted without admitting guilt or expressing remorse.
The meeting, originally planned to focus on the governmental overhaul, will include retired judges, former Knesset members, and other senior figures. Some activists, including Former National Security Council deputy director Eran Etzion, have said they will not attend due to the inclusion of the pardon issue.
Haaretz adds that Herzog, currently in the United States, is expected to return to Israel tonight and hold additional meetings related to the request. Sources say Herzog may seek concessions from Netanyahu, such as a state inquiry or halting parts of the judicial reform, linking any potential pardon to broader political conditions.
BANGKOK/PHNOM PENH — Thailand says its fighter jets struck Cambodia in an attempt to cripple its military capability, as a re-eruption of border hostilities derailed a fragile ceasefire brokered by US President Donald Trump.
Each side blames the other for starting clashes that broke out overnight and intensified before dawn and spread to several locations, with one Thai soldier and four Cambodian civilians killed, according to officials.
Cambodia accuses Thailand of “inhumane and brutal acts” of aggression, stressing it has not retaliated, while Bangkok said it carried out air strikes on military targets after its neighbor mobilized heavy weaponry and repositioned combat units.
“The objective of the army is to cripple Cambodia’s military capability for a long time to come, for the safety of our children and grandchildren,” Thai army chief of staff General Chaipruak Doungprapat says, according to the military.
The fighting was the fiercest since a five-day exchange of rockets and heavy artillery in July that marked their heaviest clashes in recent history, when at least 48 people were killed and 300,000 displaced, before Trump intervened to broker a ceasefire.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming trip to the United States — where he is set to meet US President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on December 29 — is expected to include a series of additional high-level meetings, as the American administration pushes for movement on the emerging Gaza framework, Channel 12 reports.
According to the report, the White House is working to bring Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi to the Mar-a-Lago meeting as part of efforts to secure Israeli approval for a strategic Gaza-related arrangement with Cairo.
Netanyahu is slated to remain in Florida for eight days and hold two meetings with Trump, as well as sit-downs with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Channel 12 adds that US officials conveyed to Jerusalem that Trump aims to announce the transition to the second phase of the Gaza plan before Christmas, including an initial civil administration model for Rafah.
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, a prominent Jewish leader in New York City, says he is unsurprised by Jewish support for the anti-Zionist Zohran Mamdani, while calling for a different, more expansive “new chapter” of Zionism in the Jewish community.
Cosgrove, the rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue, is a leading voice in the US Conservative community and a firm supporter of Israel.
Cosgrove, speaking at the biennial national assembly of the American Zionist Movement, says that Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, the rightward drift of the Israeli government, and intolerance in the American Jewish community toward differing political views have contributed to disaffection among young Jews.
“I may be constitutionally incapable of walking away from Israel, but others have and will continue to do so, before October 7th and all the more since. There’s a limit to the self-flagellating exercise of supporting a state that neither recognizes you nor represents your values,” Cosgrove says.
For Jews who grew up after the Holocaust, Israel’s claim to the land in the interest of survival was obvious, and Arab attacks on Israel sidelined concerns about Palestinian rights. That has changed due to settlements and the West Bank occupation, sometimes coupled with ignorance about the history of the conflict, Cosgrove says.
“For a progressive American Jew, if the project of Israel is to provide a homeland and security to a historically vulnerable Jewish minority, then how can the state not respond to the needs of the vulnerable minority in its midst?” he says.
“You may not like the fact that 30 percent of New York Jews voted for Mamdani, but you shouldn’t be surprised by it. For a liberal Zionist disillusioned by the Israeli government, Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is a difference of degree, not of kind. He understood the fissures of our community better than we ourselves did,” says Cosgrove, who is a harsh critic of Mamdani.
Cosgrove calls on the American Jewish community to engage in “heshbon ha-nefesh,” or a spiritual soul-searching.
“The argument that it’s somehow treasonous to criticize this or that Israeli policy simply doesn’t hold, as long as that criticism comes from a place of love, loyalty, and investment in the well-being of the State of Israel,” he says.
Cosgrove calls for “a new chapter of American Zionism, infused with a sense of our internal pluralism, whereby we avoid the reductive and destructive tactic of labeling people with whom we disagree either as self-hating Jews or colonialist oppressors.”
He calls for humility from American Jews who are removed from the realities of the Middle Eastern battlefield, and advocates for both holding up the security of Israel and empathy for Palestinian suffering.
“Against those who stand outside our tent, we need to hold the line. For those who seek to dwell in our tent, we must expand it. We need to do both,” he says.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres strongly condemns an Israeli raid on the East Jerusalem compound of the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA earlier today.
“This compound remains United Nations premises and is inviolable and immune from any other form of interference,” Guterres says in a statement.
“I urge Israel to immediately take all necessary steps to restore, preserve, and uphold the inviolability of UNRWA premises and to refrain from taking any further action with regard to UNRWA premises.”
In a “60 Minutes” interview, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene casts her dramatic break with US President Donald Trump as a clash over the meaning of “America First,” accusing the president of drifting toward establishment priorities and foreign entanglements — including, she says, placing Israel’s interests ahead of US domestic needs.
“For an America First president, the number one focus should have been domestic policy, and it wasn’t,” Greene tells CBS journalist Lesley Stahl. “Once we fix everything here, then, fine, we’ll talk to the rest of the world.”
She argues that Trump “has served Israel’s interest, even attacking Iran,” lumping that together with what she called his service to “Big Pharma,” and “crypto donors.”
Her criticism of Trump’s alignment with pro-Israel groups was blunt, too. Asked why she opposed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which directs the Department of Education to use the IHRA working definition of antisemitism when investigating discrimination cases on college campuses, Greene says that she has condemned antisemitism in the past.
“Since I’ve been a member of Congress, we’ve had several resolutions that constantly denounce antisemitism. I’ve already voted denouncing antisemitism many times before,” she explains. “It becomes an exercise that they force on Congress, and I simply got tired of it,” a remark that appears to nod toward pro-Israel lobbying pressure.
“Most members of Congress take donations from AIPAC, and I don’t,” she adds, referring to the prominent American pro-Israel lobbying group.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz met a short time ago with the parents of Staff Sgt. Ran Gvili, the last remaining deceased hostage in Gaza, during the envoy’s visit to Israel this week.
According to a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office, Waltz met with Talik and Itzik Gvili in Jerusalem together with Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon and government hostage pointman Gal Hirsch.
Waltz “expressed the United States’ commitment – and his own – to completing the mission of returning the hostages and bringing Rani, of blessed memory, to a burial in Israel,” the statement reads.
The PMO adds that Hirsch updated Waltz on Israel’s efforts to return Gvili’s body.
Police arrest two drivers on suspicion of ramming into a crowd of Haredi anti-draft protesters in Bnei Brak this evening.
One of the cars that was stuck in traffic caused by the demonstration on Route 4 drives at a high speed into the crowd, moderately injuring a 16-year-old, police say.
Officers at the scene chase after the driver, a 24-year-old resident of Bnei Brak, and arrest him.
Police add that they managed to stop a motorcyclist from driving into the crowd later on. They detain the driver, a 37-year-old resident of Herzliya.
Both are transferred for questioning at a nearby police station.
IDF troops operating in the northern Gaza Strip located an assault rifle that belonged to Cpt. Daniel Perez, who was killed and abducted during the October 7, 2023, onslaught; his body was returned to Israel some two months ago.
The M-16 was found by reservists of the Carmeli Brigade at a booby-trapped site in the Strip’s north, following intelligence indicating that the weapon was stored there, the military says.
Perez was stationed near the Gaza border on the morning of October 7, and he and his tank crew fought for hours against the Hamas invasion, until he was killed, alongside Sgt. Tomer Leibovitz and Staff Sgt. Itay Chen.
The bodies of Perez and Chen were taken captive to Gaza, while their comrade Matan Angrest was abducted alive.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that his government’s proposed draft law will ease the burden on reservists and increase conscription from the Haredi public, in his first remarks regarding Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chair Boaz Bismuth’s new law to regulate conscription of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students.
“This is the beginning of a historic process to integrate Haredim into the IDF,” he says, speaking before the Knesset in this evening’s 40-signature Knesset debate.
His government’s proposed law would ease the burden on reservists, Netanyahu says, claiming that “for every additional regular battalion from the Haredi public, 10 reserve battalions will be released,” which, en masse, he says would lead to the release of hundreds of reserve battalions.
Directly addressing the opposition, Netanyahu says that “the draft evasion law is the law you brought forward, not ours,” and that his government’s proposal would achieve conscription targets “three to four times higher” than those proposed by the short-lived government led by then-prime minister Naftali Bennett and Opposition Leader Yair Lapid.
“The law regulates the status of yeshiva students. The world of Torah has protected us for thousands of years and will continue to protect us while conscripting the Haredi public,” he adds.
Around 100 schoolchildren who had been kidnapped from a Catholic school in Nigeria last month are handed over to state officials, a day after authorities secured their release.
The children — many wearing football jerseys — were driven into the Niger State Government House in white buses escorted by a dozen military vans and armoured vehicles.
Dozens of the 315 students and staff abducted from the school in north-central Niger state are still missing.
Medics are responding to a suspected car ramming at a Haredi anti-enlistment protest near the entrance to Bnei Brak.
In footage of the incident, a black car is seen hurtling into a crowd of ultra-Orthodox demonstrators and then driving away on Route 4.
The ramming left a 16-year-old moderately injured, with trauma to his head and limbs, Magen David Adom says. He is being taken to Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikvah.
Police are reportedly pursuing the vehicle and its driver in a chase along the highway.
רגע לפני דריסה: רכב האיץ לעבר מפגינים חרדים בכביש 4 | @aronkalman1 pic.twitter.com/gi38A87cuU
— i24NEWS (@i24NEWS_HE) December 8, 2025
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met earlier today with US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz to discuss the advancement of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan to its second phase.
During the Jerusalem meeting, “Waltz welcomed Israel’s cooperation on expanding border crossings, including the Allenby-King Hussein Bridge crossing, for the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza and emphasized the importance of continued collaboration to address regional stability,” says a US readout.
Israel stopped allowing Gaza aid in through the Jordan-West Bank crossing in September after a driver ferrying assistance to the Strip opened fire at Israeli soldiers at the gate, killing two of them.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses his request for a pardon in his corruption trial from President Isaac Herzog and efforts to establish a commission of inquiry on the October 7 massacre during his remarks in this evening’s 40-signature Knesset debate.
Referencing his pardon request, Netanyahu reiterates his claim that the good of the country requires his trial be halted, saying: “There is a real dilemma here between the desire to continue exposing the injustice, the persecution, and the national needs — only some of which you know — security challenges as well as major opportunities I am working on.”
He adds, however, that “If it comes, it comes, and if it doesn’t come, it doesn’t come.”
On establishing a commission of inquiry into the events of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, massacre that sparked the war in Gaza, Netanyahu says: “We are advancing a national commission of inquiry into the events of October 7 and what led up to them.”
“The establishment of the commission and its makeup will be done equally between the coalition and the opposition. Who could oppose this? Only someone who does not........