Middle East Crisis: Israel Presses Offensive in Central Gaza After Deadly Strike on Shelter (2024)

Israel presses on with its central Gaza offensive after a deadly strike on a shelter.

The number and identities of those killed in the strike, in the central Gaza neighborhood of Nuseirat, remained unclear. Gazan health officials have given death tolls ranging from 41 to 46. Yasser Khattab, an official overseeing the morgue at Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in nearby Deir al Balah — where many of those killed were taken — said 18 were children and nine were women.

The Israeli military on Thursday said it was not aware of any civilian deaths in the strike, and later released the names of men it said had been killed, identifying them as militants with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. On Friday, the military released the names of an additional eight men it said were among the dead, identifying them as militants as well.

Neither Israel’s counts, nor those of Gazan health officials, could be independently confirmed.

On Friday, the Israeli military said its forces were continuing to operate in other areas of central Gaza, including Bureij and Deir al Balah, and had killed dozens of militants and destroyed tunnel shafts built by Palestinian armed groups.

Despite the concern over Israel’s Thursday strike on the complex in Nuseirat, the military also said it had bombarded more Hamas operatives on the grounds of another U.N. school compound in Shati, a coastal neighborhood northwest of Gaza City’s downtown. The number of casualties was unclear, and UNRWA, the agency for Palestinian refugees that operated the school until its evacuation in October, said it could not provide any further information.

Israeli troops also continued their offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where the Israeli military has seized much of the border area between the city and Egypt. The Israeli military said it was carrying out “intelligence-based, targeted operations,” without providing further details.

Since the war began in October, Hamas and other Palestinian militants in Gaza have used an extensive warren of underground tunnels to fight a guerrilla war, ambushing Israeli forces rather than directly confronting them. Israeli troops have returned to previously embattled areas like Bureij, in an effort to crack down on what the military says is a renewed Hamas insurgency there.

“We’re seeing that Hamas still exists, and they still have capabilities above and beneath ground,” Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, told reporters on Thursday, describing attacks by “smaller cells" of militants using rocket-propelled grenades, small arms and booby traps.

On Thursday, Hamas militants emerged from a tunnel near Rafah, just a few hundred feet from Israeli territory, in an attempt to stage an attack inside the country, the Israeli military said. Israeli drone and tank fire aimed at the militants killed three, according to the military, and an Israeli soldier was also killed in the firefight.

That same morning, Israeli aircraft struck the school compound in Nuseirat. Schools have been closed in the enclave since the beginning of the war, and the complex had been converted into a makeshift shelter that was housing roughly 6,000 displaced Palestinians, according to UNRWA.

The Israeli military said the strike had targeted militants affiliated with Hamas and another Iranian-backed armed group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who it claimed had holed up in the complex. To back up that account, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief Israeli military spokesman, late Thursday listed the names of nine militants he said had been killed in the attack and said the Israeli authorities would soon verify the identities of more.

Amid conflicting information over the death toll and the identities of the victims, Mr. Khattab, the Al Aqsa hospital morgue official, said the hospital had a system designed to document mass casualty events as accurately as possible, despite the severe challenges of the war.

As soon as word of a major strike reached the facility on Thursday, a designated official prepared to receive ambulances arriving from the Nuseirat area and began registering the dead and wounded, he said. “We look for any marker that would help us identify the person,” said Mr. Khattab, adding that officials often had to collect multiple body parts from an individual, placing them into a single bag.

The few Gaza hospitals that remain in operation have often been overwhelmed by the numbers of dead and wounded, while experiencing sporadic telecommunications blackouts. A New York Times reporter who visited Al Aqsa hospital on Thursday after the Nuseirat strike saw medics pushing through crowds of people to reach operating rooms.

What we know about the Israeli bombing that killed dozens at a former school in Gaza.

What was bombed?

The multistory building was one of several that made up the UNRWA Nuseirat Boys’ Preparatory School. It was one of the many schools in Gaza run by the main U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

Like all of the territory’s schools, it stopped operating as a school in October, after Hamas led an assault on Israel, and Israel began its retaliatory bombing campaign. And like many of them, it became crowded with people who, displaced by the war from homes in other parts of Gaza, sought shelter in schools, hospitals and other institutions they hoped would be less likely to be bombed.

Philippe Lazzarini, the director of the U.N. aid agency for Palestinian refugees, said 6,000 people had been living in the school. About three-quarters of Gaza’s roughly 2.2 million people have fled their homes, many of them multiple times.

The Israeli military has referred to the school in Nuseirat as a militant base, saying that fighters for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad used three of its classrooms to plan and conduct operations against Israel.

How many were killed in Nuseirat, and who were they?

The Israeli military on Friday released the names of eight Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters that it said were killed in the strike, adding to a list released on Thursday and bringing the total number to 17.

A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, said on Thursday that he was “not aware of any civilian casualties” as a result of the strike. The military did not respond when asked whether that was still the case on Friday.

But witnesses, medical personnel and Gazan officials said that dozens of civilians were killed — and that many were children or women.

A Gaza Health Ministry official on Thursday said that at least 41 people were killed, and another said 46. Yasser Khattab, an official overseeing the morgue at Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in nearby Deir al Balah — where many of the bodies were taken — said there were 46 dead, including 18 children and nine women. But his statements could not be independently confirmed.

Mr. Khattab said the hospital had a well-practiced system for documenting and identifying bodies and parts of bodies. “We look for any marker that would help us identify the person,” he said.

A New York Times reporter who went to the hospital after the bombing saw it crowded with the bodies of the dead, the living and relatives of both, as well as medics trying to make their way through the mass of people. Witnesses described pulling the remains of children from the rubble at the school.

Karin Huster, a medical coordinator with the aid group Doctors Without Borders who has been working at the hospital, said that most of the patients she had seen in the past few days were women and children.

How careful was Israel’s action?

The bombing in Nuseirat exemplifies the awful calculus of the eight-month-old war. Operating within densely packed neighborhoods, Hamas is accused of cynically using Palestinians and civilian infrastructure as shields. In taking aim at Hamas, Israel regularly kills civilians, and is accused — even by its allies — of using excessive, indiscriminate force.

The Israeli military maintains the airstrike was planned and carried out with care and precision, targeting only the three rooms in the school used by militants. Both there and at a camp in Rafah — where an Israeli bombing and subsequent fire killed 45 people in late May, according to Gazan officials — Israel used American-made GBU-39 bombs with about 37 pounds of explosive, which the military says are the smallest its warplanes carry.

The military said 20 to 30 militants had used the school as a base, including some who participated in the Oct. 7 assault. It said it had kept them under surveillance for three days before striking at the moment that would yield the fewest civilian casualties.

International laws of war prohibit using sites like hospitals, schools and houses of worship for military purposes. Those laws also prohibit military forces from attacking such sites, with a limited exception if the enemy is using them.

Israel says it operates within the bounds of that exception, because Hamas routinely operates within those buildings and in tunnels below them, making civilian casualties inevitable.

“We’re seeing that Hamas still exists, and they still have capabilities above and beneath ground,” Colonel Lerner said on Thursday.

In recent months, Israeli forces have repeatedly returned to places like Nuseirat where they had previously seized control and then moved on, as Hamas fighters reappear there. Israeli officials have said that proves the need to carry out strikes like the one on Thursday.

How far an attacking force can go with such operations, legal experts say, differs case by case based on how it tries to safeguard civilians and distinguish them from combatants, and how proportional the attack is to the military advantage gained. In other words, it can be very murky in specific instances.

Richard Pérez-Peña and Ephrat Livni contributed reporting.

The U.S. military says its forces destroyed Houthi drones and missiles for a second day.

The Central Command said in a post on social media that its forces acted after determining that the drones and missiles presented an “imminent threat to U.S., coalition forces, and merchant vessels in the region.” A day earlier, the command said its forces had destroyed eight aerial drones and two marine drones launched from Houthi-controlled areas, citing the same imperative.

The Houthis — an Iran-backed Shiite armed group that controls Yemen’s northwest and its capital, Sana — have for months disrupted global maritime trade by attacked shipping lanes in waters leading to the Suez Canal, saying they were acting in support of Palestinians in Gaza. In response, the United States assembled a naval task force, called Operation Prosperity Guardian, that works with Britain and other allies to patrol the Red Sea and check the attacks.

The U.N. is adding Israel, Hamas and Islamic Jihad to its list of countries and groups that harm children in conflict zones.

Hamas, the armed group that led Gaza before the war, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second-largest armed group in the enclave, will be named in the report. Hamas is being cited because its fighters abducted and killed Israeli children when they attacked Israel on Oct. 7, a U.N. official said. Armed groups that harm children in conflicts, like the Taliban and Boko Haram, are routinely named in the annual report.

The news of Israel’s listing further strained an already deteriorating relationship between it and the United Nations.

Mr. Erdan called the move “an immoral decision that aids terrorism and rewards terrorists.” He made a video recording of the phone call and released parts of it on the social media site X.

Mr. Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, called the release of a recording of the telephone call “shocking and unacceptable and something I’ve never seen in my 25 years serving this organization.”

The United Nations’ special representative for children and armed conflict prepares the yearly report under a mandate from the General Assembly and the Security Council. The report will be presented to members of the Council next Friday and released publicly on June 18, Mr. Dujarric said. The Council will have an open debate about the report’s findings later this month.

During Hamas’s terrorist attack on Oct. 7, armed men kidnapped children, some of them toddlers and babies, and held them hostage in Gaza. Children were also among the roughly 1,200 Israelis and foreigners killed.

Israel’s retaliatory bombing campaign and ground war in Gaza has killed at least 36,000 people, Gazan health officials say, a large portion of them women and children. The United Nations has said that children in Gaza also face famine and starvation because Israel has restricted humanitarian aid. Many children have also lost limbs or been gravely wounded in other ways.

Majed Bamya, the Palestinian deputy ambassador to the United Nations, said in a post on X, “Israeli ministers are the only ones surprised of such a development (list will be released next week) after the killing and maiming of so many Palestinian children.”

Blinken plans to return to the Middle East next week.

The Biden administration is trying hard to stop the fighting in Gaza in hopes of freeing Israeli — and some Israeli-American — hostages held by Hamas and ending a conflict that has exacted a grievous toll in lives, physically devastated most of Gaza and created political pressure on President Biden to restrict U.S. arms deliveries to Israel.

Relations between the Biden administration and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel are particularly fraught in the wake of Mr. Biden’s decision to hold up the delivery of American 2,000-pound bombs, a move meant to ensure that they are not used in the sort of “full-scale invasion” of the Gazan city of Rafah that Mr. Biden has said he opposes.

Mr. Blinken’s travels also come as worries are rising that fighting might escalate along Israel’s northern border with the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran. The exchanges of fire have prompted evacuations on both sides of the border.

A cease-fire would “unlock the possibility of achieving calm along Israel’s northern border — so both displaced Israeli and Lebanese families can return to their homes,” Mr. Miller’s statement said.

Qatar and Egypt have each played roles as mediators between Hamas and Israel, which do not negotiate directly.

Israel recently strained relations with Egypt by seizing “tactical control” of a buffer zone on the Egypt-Gaza border, known as the Philadelphi Corridor.

In Jordan, Mr. Blinken is expected to attend a conference on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza co-hosted by Jordan, Egypt, and the United Nations.

An Israeli strike kills the mayor of the town where a school complex-turned-mass shelter was hit.

Among those killed was the local mayor, Iyad al-Maghari, whose position made him part of Hamas’s governance structure in the enclave. Mr. al-Maghari was providing municipal services to both residents and displaced people, the Gaza government said. The Israeli military said he was a “terrorist operative” with a long history in the armed group.

The attack on the school complex, where thousands of Palestinians were sheltering, killed dozens, including at least nine women and 18 children, according to an official at the morgue at a nearby hospital.

The Israeli military defended that strike, saying it had targeted a group of militants using three former classrooms as a base, but the U.N. Human Rights Office said the casualties suggested a failure of the Israeli military to ensure strict compliance with international humanitarian law.

The U.N.’s office of humanitarian affairs reported that Israeli bombardments from the air, land and sea continued across much of Gaza on Friday, killing people and destroying homes. The Gaza Health Ministry reported Friday that 77 people had been killed in Israeli strikes over the previous 24 hours.

Nuseirat lies in an area where tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians in Gaza have fled to escape fighting over the eight months of Israel’s war in Gaza, and their numbers have swelled in recent weeks after the Israeli military invaded the southern city of Rafah, forcing another mass exodus of civilians.

The Gaza government office accused Israel of intentionally assassinating the mayor, Iyad al-Maghari, to sow chaos and deepen the humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territory. Most of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents have been displaced, and nearly all rely on international aid. Mr. al-Maghari had refused to abandon his job as town mayor and was helping to provide municipal services to Nuseirat residents and people who had been displaced there, the government said.

The Israeli military described Mr. al-Maghari as a longtime member of Hamas, serving in the past as part of the group’s West Bank headquarters and taking a significant role in the planning of attacks on Israeli targets in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

More than a million Gazans have been forced to flee Rafah, which had previously been a place of refuge for people fleeing bombardments elsewhere. At one point, the United Nations said more than half of Gaza’s population had clustered in Rafah.

Now, many have fled to cities and towns in central Gaza, where on Friday the U.N.’s office of humanitarian affairs reported especially intense airstrikes, including on Nuseirat. That underscored a point U.N. officials and aid organizations have said repeatedly — that no parts of Gaza are safe havens for civilians.

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

Pleas for help echo through a hospital after a deadly Israeli attack.

Early on Thursday, Israeli airstrikes hit the school complex, killing dozens of people — among them at least nine militants, the Israeli military said.

Over the course of the day, corpses and mangled limbs recovered from the rubble were wrapped in blankets, stacked in truck beds and driven to Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the last major medical facility still operating in central Gaza.

Israel’s military described the airstrike as painstakingly planned. Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari told reporters that Israeli forces had tracked the militants in the school-turned-shelter for three days before opening fire.

“The Israeli military and the Shin Bet found a solution to separate the terrorists from those seeking shelter,” he said.

But accounts from both local and foreign medics, and a visit to the hospital by The New York Times on Thursday afternoon, made clear that civilians died, too.

Outside the hospital morgue, crowds gathered to weep and pray over the dead. Hospital corridors were crowded with people pleading for help, or at least a little comfort.

A young girl with a bloodied leg screamed, “Mama! Mama!”, as her sobbing mother followed her through the hospital corridors.

The precise toll could not be verified, but the Gaza Health Ministry said that of the roughly 40 people killed in the attack, 14 were children and nine were women. Later in the day, The Associated Press reported different numbers, saying at least 33 people died, including three women and nine children, citing the hospital morgue.

Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital has become a symbol not just of the heavy loss of life in central Gaza, but also of the increasing sense of desperation among Gazans struggling to find a place there that is still safe.

In the past few weeks, the region has swelled with people fleeing another Israeli offensive, this one in the southern city of Rafah. Before that offensive began, Rafah was the main place of refuge for civilians, at one point holding more than half the population of the Gaza Strip.

Then on Wednesday, Israel announced that it had started a new operation against Hamas militants in central Gaza — the very place where many Gazans who had fled Rafah had ended up.

The strike on the school complex came early the next day, around 2 a.m. It hit a building at a complex run by UNRWA, the main U.N. Palestinian aid agency in Gaza.

Since the Israeli offensive in Gaza began in October, in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack on Israel, such schools have been used to shelter Gazans forced from their homes by the fighting. Israel says Hamas hides its forces in civilian settings like schools or hospitals, an accusation the group denies.

In the past two days of the new military campaign, Al Aqsa took in 140 dead and hundreds of wounded, health workers said.

“It’s complete chaos, because we have mass casualty after mass casualty, but less and less medical supplies to treat them,” said Karin Huster, a nurse with the international aid group Doctors Without Borders who has been working as a medical coordinator at the hospital.

During the visit to Al Aqsa by The Times, medics could be seen pushing through crowds of panicked people to try to reach operating rooms, delayed by the sheer mass of people. Amid the confusion, Ms. Huster said, medics sometimes brought mortally wounded people into operating rooms, wasting vital time for those who still had a chance at survival.

Ms. Huster said that the majority of people she had seen in the past few days were women and children.

By early afternoon Thursday, after burying a friend he pulled from the rubble of the school complex, Mr. Abu Ammar found himself once again at the hospital.

This time, he was accompanied by the friend’s brother, whom he was trying to cram into a hallway near the entrance. The brother’s face was cut by shrapnel, and he had a deep gash in his right leg.

But he was not the only one desperate for help.

All around them were wounded people, some lying in their own blood on the floor, others on beds calling for help. A man whose face was blackened with burns and dust from the explosion that morning begged two relatives who were with him to fan his face with a piece of cardboard they were waving over him.

The scenes among the dead in the morgue were almost as chaotic as those among the living. Bodies lay everywhere, as relatives crowded in, weeping and screaming over them. The stench of blood was overpowering.

Crowds outside the morgue ebbed and flowed as bodies wrapped in blankets — shrouds were in short supply — were lifted onto pickup trucks to be taken for burial. Relatives and friends lined up to pray before the dead were driven away. Even passers-by on the street stopped to join in.

“When is it too much?” Ms. Huster said. “I don’t know anymore how I can phrase this so that it shocks people. Where has humanity gone wrong?”

A pier for aid shipments, damaged in rough seas, has been restored to the Gaza shore, the U.S. says.

Admiral Cooper said that aid would begin to flow through the pier again “in the coming days.”

He said that military engineers “provided all the necessary support to ensure the safe and placement of the pier to the beach,” adding: “The policy of no U.S. boots on the ground does remain in effect.” White House policy does not allow U.S. troops on the ground in Gaza.

Once the aid resumes, Admiral Cooper estimated, about one million pounds of goods would enter Gaza through the pier over each two-day period.

In early March, President Biden surprised the Pentagon by announcing that the U.S. military would build a pier for Gaza.

In the days after it became operational on May 17, trucks were looted as they made their way to a warehouse, forcing the U.N. World Food Program to suspend operations. After officials beefed up security, the weather turned bad. American officials had been hoping that the sea surges would not start until later in the summer.

The situation in Gaza remains dire. Health officials say more than 36,000 people have been killed; many people have been displaced; and the United Nations has warned that famine is looming.

Netanyahu threatened ‘very intense action’ at the Lebanon border. What is happening there?

Why are the two sides fighting?

Hezbollah, a powerful Lebanese militia and political movement, launched attacks into Israel on Oct. 8, answering calls by Hamas to open a second front a day after the Palestinian armed group that rules Gaza led a deadly assault on Israel. Both Hezbollah and Hamas are backed by Iran.

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has said that his group is trying to pin Israel’s troops along the border and limit its capacity to attack Hamas in Gaza.

Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel goes back decades. Israel has invaded Lebanon three times in the last 50 years, most recently in 2006, when the two sides fought a monthlong war that killed more than 1,000 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and more than 150 in Israel, mostly soldiers. The current round of fighting marks the most serious escalation since then.

What is the latest?

Israel in February launched its deepest strikes into Lebanon in years, hitting the Bekaa Valley in response to a surface-to-air missile attack that downed an Israeli drone over southern Lebanon.

In April, Hezbollah launched a drone and missile attack on northern Israel that wounded 14 soldiers, one of whom died. Later that month, the group claimed to have launched its deepest attack in Israel since October, targeting a barracks north of the city of Acre with drones.

In recent weeks, Hezbollah for the first time began targeting Israel’s vaunted Iron Dome missile defense system.

This week, a Hezbollah rocket attack caused wildfires to break out in northern Israel, prompting Mr. Netanyahu on Wednesday to issue a threat of “very intense action” to “restore security to the north.”

What is the toll of the clashes so far?

Strikes across the border have caused casualties on both sides. In Lebanon, Hezbollah says that more than 300 fighters have been killed, while the United Nations says that around 80 civilians have died. In Israel, the authorities say that 19 security personnel and at least eight civilians have been killed.

Some senior Hezbollah and Hamas officials have also been assassinated in Lebanon. A top Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, died in a suspected Israeli strike outside Beirut in January. A commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force was killed in southern Lebanon the same month.

The Israel authorities have ordered the evacuation of 60,000 civilians from border areas. On the Lebanon side, over 90,000 people have fled their homes.

Could the clashes lead to a full-scale war?

Despite the escalation, analysts say that both sides realize a full-scale war would pose significant risks.

Mr. Netanyahu has repeatedly said he is determined to push Hezbollah back from the border and allow displaced Israelis to return home, a key domestic political issue. Analysts say pressure from his far-right coalition allies could prompt him to launch a wider attack.

But with thousands of fighters and a vast arsenal of rockets, Hezbollah is capable of hitting infrastructure and cities across Israel, and any invasion of Lebanon would likely prove costly for Israeli forces as they continue to battle Hamas in Gaza.

A war would also devastate Lebanon, which is grappling with political deadlock and the effects of a historic economic collapse. During the 2006 war, Israeli strikes flattened large areas of Beirut and displaced nearly one million people.

Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Qassem, said this week that the armed group was not seeking to widen the conflict, but would wage war if attacked. The Biden administration has sought since Oct. 7 to prevent a wider regional war and to bring the two sides to the table, but Hezbollah says it will not negotiate until the war in Gaza ends.

In the court of public opinion, both sides make their case for following international law.

The most recent instance came when the Israeli military on Thursday struck a former United Nations school in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, where civilians were sheltering. The strike killed dozens, including women and children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Hamas called it “a crime committed with premeditation,” in a statement on social media.

An Israeli military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said the operation was limited and aimed precisely at combatants. He said Israel targeted three specific classrooms in the school that were being used by terrorists, including some involved in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel led by Hamas, and noted that the military waited for days before striking to try to limit civilian casualties.

The Israeli army late Thursday released the names of nine members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad that it said were killed in the strike, adding that it was working on verifying others. Admiral Hagari accused Hamas of violating international law by using civilians as shields and hiding in schools and hospitals, and he emphasized Israel’s adherence to international law.

The main legal considerations when assessing a military’s conduct in conflict are “distinction” and “proportionality,” according to Gary D. Solis, a retired Marine and Marine judge advocate, and author of “The Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War.”

International humanitarian law began developing in the 19th century with a treaty on prisoners of war that paved the path for the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and subsequent agreements governing conduct in conflict. These were widely adopted, and they try to ensure minimal civilian casualties and damage. The principles governing conduct, like distinction and proportionality, have developed through court cases and become customary law, but they are complicated and subject to interpretation, Mr. Solis said.

“Distinction” simply requires soldiers to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants and to target only fighters. “But that doesn’t say how you apply it,” Mr. Solis said. “It’s not a black and white conclusion. You don’t have bright line distinctions.”

“Proportionality” is similarly complex. “It’s easier to state than understand,” Mr. Solis said. This principle provides that combatants must act proportionally, meaning that civilian deaths and damage can’t exceed the military advantage of an operation.

What is an acceptable number of deaths and damage, and what is excessive? What is the right amount of “military advantage?” There is no single answer, Mr. Solis said. Speaking generally, he said, an army cannot level a town to kill 10 enemy soldiers, but perhaps it could strike a single house for that many.

“Every case has to be examined on its own merits,” Mr. Solis counseled. “Don’t be dismayed if you can’t put your finger on it, because by their very nature the principles are flexible, not fixed.”

Netanyahu is set to address Congress on July 24.

But in a separate statement that hinted at the deep political divides over Mr. Netanyahu and Israel’s war in Gaza, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said he harbored “clear and profound disagreements with the prime minister, which I have voiced both privately and publicly and will continue to do so.” He said he nevertheless had joined the request for Mr. Netanyahu to address Congress because “America’s relationship with Israel is ironclad and transcends one person or prime minister.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Schumer called for Mr. Netanyahu to step down and for Israel to hold new elections.

The bipartisan invitation to Mr. Netanyahu, issued last month by the top four congressional leaders with no date attached, masked a fraught behind-the-scenes debate over receiving him. The need for separate statements from the leaders of the two parties explaining their different rationales for extending the invitation underscored those tensions.

Some progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont have already promised to boycott the speech, calling Mr. Netanyahu a “war criminal” for his tactics in the war against Hamas, which has killed tens of thousands of people in Gaza and caused a humanitarian disaster.

Republicans, in contrast, are eager to hug Mr. Netanyahu close and unequivocally back his policies. Mr. Johnson has been the driving force behind the invitation.

“I am very moved to have the privilege of representing Israel before both houses of Congress and to present the truth about our just war against those who seek to destroy us to the representatives of the American people and the entire world,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement accepting the invitation.