The aerial bombardment continue unabated today in Gaza Stripin ruins after more than seven months of war, as Palestinian civilians flee for safety, especially from the Rafawhere the threat of a large-scale ground operation by the Israeli armed forces is magnified.
In the middle of the war, which is going through the 221st day whose trigger was the unprecedented raid on southern sectors of Israeli territory launched by its military arm Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on October 7, Israelis yesterday commemorated Memorial Day – the soldiers who died fighting and the victims of attacks – and, today, they celebrate the 76th anniversary of the founding of their state.
In the early hours of the morning, eyewitnesses and AFP correspondents spoke of airstrikes in various sectors of the Gaza Strip; the Palestinian Civil Protection counted at least eight dead in one of them alone, which targeted a property in the Nuseirat refugee camp (center) .
Sectors of Rafah (south), where some 1.4 million Palestinians had taken refuge to escape the shelling and fighting, were also bombed for another day. However, some of them – 360,000 people, according to the latest UN calculations – are now leaving the city en masse, over the closed border with Egypt.
On May 7, the Israeli army invaded the eastern sector of Rafah with tanks and at the same time its units seized the crossing point connecting the small coastal enclave with Egyptian territory – the gateway through which most humanitarian aid had entered until then. At the same time, he ordered civilians to leave a part of the city where he is operating against the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas.
On foot, by car, by whatever means they found, residents continued to leave Rafa yesterday, after dismantling their tents and gathering their usually meager possessions.
Other residents, who remain in Rafa, are desperate. “Since morning I have been looking for bread for my children to eat, in vain. My children are on the road and I don’t know where to take them. Rafa has turned into a ghost town,” Mustafa Dib said.
“The bakeries are closed, all the shops are closed. We have no water, food, nothing,” said another resident, Ahmed at Tawil.
“Annihilation”;
The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to wipe out Hamas, which seized power in the Gaza Strip in 2007 and is designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the US and the EU.
To eliminate Hamas, Mr Netanyahu calls a ground operation necessary in Rafah, which he says is the last major stronghold of the Palestinian Islamist movement, defying international concerns about the civilian population.
The US, Israel’s main international ally, opposes the operation, and US officials in recent days have questioned even the idea that Hamas can be completely eliminated.
“We continue to work with Israel” to find “a better way to ensure the defeat of Hamas everywhere in Gaza, including Rafah,” rather, so that Israel does not engage “in a never-ending counter-insurgency campaign,” White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan noted yesterday.
Bombings “everywhere”
Fighting has been raging again for days in Jabalia and Gaza City (north), where the Israeli military said Hamas was trying to rebuild “military capabilities”.
There, too, emergency civilian evacuation orders issued forced civilians to flee, with the UN stressing that “no location is safe in the Gaza Strip.”
“We are shelling from one location to another, but the shelling continues everywhere,” said Mahmoud al-Bars, who traveled from Jabalia to Gaza City, largely flattened after more than seven months of shelling and fighting.
On October 7, Hamas’ military arm launched an unprecedented Gaza-based raid on southern parts of the Israeli territory, killing more than 1,170 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official data. . Another 250-plus people were kidnapped and taken to the Palestinian enclave, where 128 remain, but at least 36 of them are believed to be dead, according to the Israeli military.
In retaliation, Israel has since carried out large-scale military operations in the Gaza Strip, which have caused humanitarian disaster and an extremely heavy death toll, at least 35,091 dead, mostly civilians, according to Hamas’ health ministry.
For Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the death toll in the Gaza Strip is about 30,000 dead, of which “14,000” were “combatants” and “probably about 16,000” were “civilians,” he said in a podcast.
US does not see ‘genocide’
Faced with the ongoing wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, the administration of the US president Joe Biden announced that he did not consider Israel to be committing “genocide” in the Gaza Strip, but called for “more to be done to ensure the protection of civilians”.
According to the Hamas Health Ministry, the health system in the Gaza Strip is on the brink of “collapse” due to a lack of fuel for hospital generators and ambulances.
Humanitarian aid deliveries have been paralyzed since the Israeli army seized the Rafah crossing.
A foreign member of the DSS, the UN security agency, was killed when a vehicle he was traveling in came under fire on his way to a hospital. This is the first foreign worker of the organization to be killed since October 7 in the enclave. The UN says that some 200 workers have lost their lives in its services, but until yesterday they were all Palestinians.
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