Ukraine’s military says Russian ICBM strikes Dnipro, a claim denied by Western official
Emergency responders are dispatched to the scene after a Russian attack that killed at least 13 people in Glukhiv, Sumy Oblast. The number of victims increased to 13, including 3 children. Search and rescue efforts continue for those trapped under the rubble of the partially destroyed dormitory building. (Photo by Ukraine State Emergency Service / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Russia on Thursday launched an intercontinental ballistic missile toward Ukraine, officials in Kyiv said, but a Western official told ABC News that the attack did not appear to be an ICBM.
It was instead a ballistic missile, which was aimed at Dnipro, in Ukraine’s southeast, the Western official said.
The claim was not immediately confirmed by Moscow, with Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declining to comment, saying questions about it should be instead directed to the Russian Defense Ministry.
The Ukrainian Air Force announced on Thursday morning that it had tracked the launch of the ICBM, along with six additional missiles, all of which were targeting the Dnipro region. The ICBM appeared to have been launched from the Astrahan region, in Russia’s southwest, Ukrainian military officials said.
All of the missiles were launched in about two hours, beginning at about 5 a.m., Ukraine said.
All were targeted at businesses and critical infrastructure, but only the missile that Ukraine identified as an ICBM struck the city, Ukraine said. The six other missiles were shot down. There were no reports of casualties or significant damage, officials said.
The launch of an ICBM, if confirmed, would arrive amid concerns that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine could further escalate. Ukraine’s military this week first launched U.S.-made ATACMS missiles toward targets within Russia, days after U.S. President Joe Biden allowed for such use of the long-range weapons.
Kyiv launched on Tuesday six of the ATACMS at targets within Russian territory, according the Russian Defense Ministry.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he would not confirm if Ukraine had used ATACMS to conduct a strike on an ammunition depot in the Bryansk region of Russia, but said Ukraine has ATACMS and “will use all of these,” against Russia.
Within hours of Russia announcing it had struck down five of the ATACMS on Tuesday, the Kremlin announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin had updated the country’s nuclear doctrine, a move that lowered the bar for Russia to response with nuclear weapons.
Russian ICBMs are capable of carrying nuclear warheads, although it appeared the missile fired on Thursday was not.
ABC News’ Joe Simonetti, Lauren Minore and Yulia Drozd contributed to this report.
This image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, acquired May 13, 2018, during winter at the South Pole of Mars, shows a carbon dioxide ice cap covering the region. As the sun returns in the spring, “spiders” begin to emerge from the landscape. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)
(NEW YORK) — Over two decades since NASA researchers first saw images of mysterious, spider-like formations across the southern hemisphere of Mars, the space agency announced it’s recreated the planet’s “spiders” here on Earth.
Dubbed “araneiform terrain,” the formations span over a half-mile long and have hundreds of branches that resemble spider legs, according to NASA.
Theories surrounding the Red Planet’s “spiders” date back to 2003, when researchers got a glimpse of the terrain via Mars orbiters, with many believing they are formed through carbon dioxide ice, which doesn’t occur naturally on Earth.
To confirm this hypothesis, researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California said they recreated the formation process in a simulated Mars environment that mimicked the planet’s air pressure and temperature.
The simulation chamber — called the Dirty Under-vacuum Simulation Testbed for Icy Environments, or DUSTIE for short — uses liquid nitrogen to reach temperatures as low as minus 301 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NASA.
Results from the five-year study were published this month in The Planetary Science Journal.
“The spiders are strange, beautiful geologic features in their own right,” JPL researcher Lauren Mc Keown said in a Sept. 11 press release. “These experiments will help tune our models for how they form.”
Researchers found that when sunlight heats soil underneath slabs of carbon dioxide ice that form on the surface of Mars each winter, the soil absorbs the heat and causes the ice closest to it to turn directly into carbon dioxide gas, according to NASA.
This process, called “sublimation,” causes the ice to crack and brings dust and soil to the surface of the ice, according to the agency.
“When winter turns to spring and the remaining ice sublimates, according to the theory, the spiderlike scars from those small eruptions are what’s left behind,” researchers wrote in the study.
To recreate the formation process in DUSTIE, researchers said they analyzed simulated Mars soil that was contained and submerged into a liquid nitrogen bath.
Matching the reduced air pressure to match that of Mars’ southern hemisphere, researchers said they watched as carbon dioxide gas then flowed into the chamber and condensed into ice over a period of three to five hours.
Researchers then placed a heater inside the chamber below the simulated soil to warm it up and crack the ice.
Mc Keown said she was “ecstatic” when the theories were proven by seeing a carbon dioxide gas plume erupt from within the Mars soil simulation.
Lab experiments and orbiter images are the closest look NASA has at these unique Martian spiders, with the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers exploring far from the region where they occur.
So far, a spacecraft has yet to land on the Red Planet’s southern hemisphere.
Mohammed Talatene/picture alliance via Getty Images
(LONDON) — Yahya Sinwar, one of the key architects of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, emerged over the summer as the de facto leader of the terrorist organization.
Israeli officials confirmed Thursday that Sinwar’s reign, however, was short-lived. The 61-year-old leader of Hamas was one of three militants killed in an Israeli military strike in the Gaza Strip, Israel Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in a personal message to dozens of foreign ministers around the world.
“The master murderer Yahya Sinwar, who is responsible for the massacre and atrocities of October 7, was killed today by IDF soldiers,” Katz said.
Sinwar had been among the top targets sought by Israel, which placed a $400,000 bounty on his head following the Oct. 7 surprise attack on Israel that left more than 1,200 people dead and 240 taken hostage.
Israeli officials announced on Aug. 1 that they killed Mohammed Deif, commander of Hamas’ military wing, in a “precise, targeted strike” on July 13 in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis. Deif and Sinwar were allegedly the masterminds of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Sinwar was elevated to political leader of Hamas in Gaza in August after Iranian officials confirmed that the previous Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in a bombing at a guest house in Tehran, where he was staying while attending the inauguration of Iran’s president-elect, Masoud Pezeshkian.
Haniyeh’s death left Sinwar calling the shots for Hamas at a time when negotiations involving the White House have been underway for a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of the remaining Israeli hostages.
Sinwar had not been publicly heard from since late 2023, when Hamas and affiliated groups launched the surprise attack in Israel. It was believed that he was hiding in the vast network of Hamas tunnels under the Gaza Strip.
Sinwar helped establish Hamas in the late 1980s. In 1989, an Israeli court sentenced him to four life sentences for his role in killing suspected Palestinian informers and plotting to murder two Israeli soldiers. He spent 22 years in prison and was one of more than 1,000 Palestinian detainees who were released in 2011 in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held hostage by Hamas for five years.
At the time of his imprisonment, Sinwar was head of Hamas’ infamous internal security arm, Al-Majd. Israeli and Palestinian sources told ABC News that his job was to investigate members of Hamas who were potentially working with the Israelis.
In an interview with ABC News in December, Michael Koubi, a former officer in Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security organization, said he interrogated Sinwar, while he was a prisoner, for more than 150 hours.
Koubi described Sinwar as “tough” and devoid of emotions but “not a psychopath.”
Koubi told ABC News that Sinwar — dubbed “the butcher of Khan Younis,” for the town in Gaza that he was from — boasted during his interrogations about killing suspected Palestinian informants with “a razor blade” and “a machete.”
In 2017, six years after his release from an Israeli prison, Sinwar was elected the overall chief of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Sinwar’s ideology and long-term hatred toward Israel were what motivated him to attack the country on Oct. 7, according to Koubi.
Following the attack on Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Dec. 6 that it was “only a matter of time” before Sinwar was located. Israeli military leaders had described him as “a dead man walking.”
Koubi told ABC News in December that he expected Sinwar would eventually go down fighting, saying Sinwar wanted to “die a hero of the slum, as a hero of Hamas, as a hero of the Gaza people.”
(LONDON) — Smoke and question marks still hang over the devastated Gaza Strip a year after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack touched off a regional firestorm.
The fighting in Gaza continues, though the epicenter of the broader conflict has now shifted north to the Israel-Lebanon border where Hezbollah is maintaining the Iran-led “Axis of Resistance” second front.
Cease-fire negotiations appear stalled. The majority of Gaza’s population remains displaced. Swaths of its homes and infrastructure are leveled. More than 46,000 are dead, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry.
In the ruins, sporadic battles continue between the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas.
Around 100 of the 250 hostages — kidnapped during Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack on southern Israel, which killed around 1,200 people — remain in captivity in Gaza. Only half are thought to still be alive.
Israel launched its military response to the massacre without publicly laying out a detailed post-war vision.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said as early as November 2023 that Israel requires “overall security responsibility” for the strip “for an indefinite period.”
That would include an expanded “security perimeter” around Gaza’s frontiers and control of the Philadelphi Corridor area along the Egypt-Gaza frontier, Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu has said his envisioned “total victory” is close. Current Israeli deployments in the strip hint at its eventual shape.
“Israel holds two narrow territorial strips — Philadelphi and Netzarim,” Michael Milshtein, a former head of Palestinian affairs for Israeli military intelligence, told ABC News.
The former is around 9 miles long and runs along the entire border with Egypt. The latter runs around 2.5 miles east to west from Israel to the Gaza coast, bisecting the strip.
“The IDF is really in these corridors and around the boundaries of Gaza,” said Orna Mizrahi, who served in the Israeli prime minister’s office as deputy national security adviser for foreign policy.
Units can launch operations deeper into Gaza from these staging points “according to the intelligence that they have,” Mizrahi said.
A year of fighting has already changed the physical and demographic map of Gaza, Milshtein said.
“Eight percent of the people who lived in Gaza before Oct. 7, they do not live in Gaza or exist in Gaza anymore,” he said, with tens of thousands having been killed or fled.
The majority of Gazans have been displaced, some repeatedly. Continued Israeli operations may force more mass movements.
Netanyahu is now considering the so-called “Generals’ Plan,” in which the IDF would evacuate all remaining civilians from the north of the strip and lay siege to the militants — and the civilians — who stay behind.
Retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland said the plan would turn the northern strip into “a military zone” in which “every figure is a target and, most importantly, no supplies enter this territory.”
“I’m not sure that it will really defeat Hamas,” Milshtein said of the proposal. “And of course, it won’t bring the release of the hostages.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, told ABC News in September that Hamas is “almost finished.”
Hamas’ political chief Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran in July. The same month, the IDF claimed to have killed infamous Hamas military leader Mohamed Deif, though the group said he survived the attempt.
Only Yahya Sinwar — Hamas’ leader in Gaza — is still thought to be alive, likely in the sprawling network of tunnels beneath the strip and possibly surrounding himself with hostages.
But Israel’s military planning does not appear to have yet given way to the political.
U.S.-sponsored efforts to build an international coalition to rebuild — and perhaps also oversee — Gaza has thus far proved fruitless.
So, too, have suggestions that the Palestinian Authority — which partially controls the West Bank in cooperation with Israel, is led by President Mahmoud Abbas and is dominated by the Fatah party — take control.
Meanwhile, far-right Israeli settler groups — among them influential members of Netanyahu’s government — are pushing to revive and expand settlements abandoned when Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
“Can you take all the tactical and military achievements, and translate them to the strategic?” Milshtein asked. “This is much more complicated.”
Also complicated is the concept of total victory over Hamas, which remains active despite reportedly massive casualties.
“They have no battalions, but that’s okay, because they rely on cells, platoons and smaller units,” Milshtein said.
“I really don’t see when or if we will see any white flag or announcement about ‘total defeat’ and ‘giving up.’ I’m not sure that it’s going to happen very soon — or at all.”
