WORLD BRIEFING: December 16, 2023
Israel - Hamas War
The IDF says three Israeli hostages who were mistakenly killed in Gaza by the Israeli military had been holding up a white cloth on a stick. An initial report by Israel's military into the deaths found that the hostages were fired upon against Israel's rules of engagement. Protests over the killings took place in Tel Aviv with calls for the Israeli government to do more to bring home hostages from Gaza. Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described the deaths as an "unbearable tragedy" - BBC
The health ministry in Gaza, which is run by Hamas, says more than 18,700 people have been killed and 50,000 injured in the enclave since the start of the Gaza war
Since the start of the war, some 20 Palestinian families have been forced out of their homes in the Jordan Valley by settler violence. Meanwhile, the army denies shepherd communities access to water. Israeli volunteers are trying to protect them - Haaretz
Ukraine War
Overnight, Ukraine was attacked with Shahed drones launched from Russian Federation territory. The strike deployed a total of 31 Shahed-136/131 attack drones to various regions of Ukraine. The defense against the air assault involved anti-aircraft missile units and mobile fire groups from the Air Force and Defense Forces of Ukraine. In the course of the engagement, Ukrainian forces successfully repelled 30 Shahed drones. The affected regions included Dnipropetrovsk, Kyiv, Vinnytsia, Chernihiv, Sumy, Poltava, Cherkasy, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, and Khmelnytsky.
A Russian propaganda campaign involving thousands of fake accounts on TikTok spreading disinformation about the war in Ukraine has been uncovered by the BBC. Its videos routinely attract millions of views and have the apparent aim of undermining Western support. Users in several European countries have been subjected to false claims that senior Ukrainian officials and their relatives bought luxury cars or villas abroad after Russia's invasion in February 2022. The fake TikTok videos played a part in the dismissal last September of Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, according to his daughter Anastasiya Shteinhauz - BBC
Elsewhere
A Vatican tribunal on Saturday convicted a cardinal of embezzlement and sentenced him to 5 ½ years in prison in one of several verdicts handed down in a complicated financial trial that aired the city state’s dirty laundry and tested its justice system. Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the first cardinal ever prosecuted by the Vatican criminal court, was absolved of several other charges and his nine co-defendants received a mixed outcome of some guilty verdicts and many acquittals of the nearly 50 charges brought against them during a 2 ½ year trial. Becciu’s lawyer, Fabio Viglione, said he respected the sentence but would appeal - AP