2024-02-14 13:17:56
According to a media report, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has called on Hamas to quickly conclude a hostage agreement with the Israeli government. The Islamist organization should agree to such a deal to protect the Palestinian people and prevent an Israeli attack on the city of Rafah, Abbas said, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.
The president of the Palestinian Authority continued to say that people must be spared another catastrophe. An attack on Rafah would result in thousands of casualties, suffering and displacement.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the military last week to submit to the government plans for an offensive in Rafah and for the evacuation of the population there. The aim is to destroy the last fighting units of the Islamist Hamas there.
A military offensive in Rafah, which lies in the very south of the Gaza Strip and borders Egypt, is considered highly problematic. The town, which had around 300,000 inhabitants before the war, is now said to be home to 1.3 million people. Most of them fled there from other parts of the Gaza Strip before the war, partly on orders from the Israeli military. UN Secretary General António Guterres and the US government spoke out clearly once morest military action by Israel in the city.
According to the Hamas-controlled health authority, 103 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks and fighting in the Gaza Strip within 24 hours. At the same time, another 145 people were injured. Since the war began on October 7th, a total of 28,576 residents of the coastal strip have been killed and 68,291 injured. The numbers might not initially be independently verified.
According to eyewitnesses and Palestinian media reports, a number of people left the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Wednesday who had initially sought protection from the fighting there. According to residents, the clinic in the largest city in the south of the coastal area has recently come under repeated fire. According to eyewitnesses, the Israeli military asked the internally displaced people to leave the clinic.
When asked, the army said it was trying to evacuate the civilian population from the combat zone in the west of the city. The people in the Nasser Hospital area were also shown a safe route “towards the humanitarian zone”. According to its own statements, the military does not intend to evacuate patients and medical staff from the clinic. Israeli soldiers will therefore “continue to act in accordance with international law once morest the terrorist organization Hamas, which cynically takes up residence in hospitals and civilian infrastructure.”
Negotiations on a new ceasefire in the Gaza war and on the release of further hostages held by the Islamist Hamas are currently progressing slowly. At a meeting in Cairo on Tuesday, senior representatives from the USA, Israel, Qatar and Egypt failed to reach an agreement, the New York Times reported. The talks should therefore continue in the coming days.
The negotiations are regarding an exchange of hostages that Hamas and other extremist Palestinian groups kidnapped from Israel to the Gaza Strip on October 7th for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. Other points include the duration of a ceasefire and aid deliveries to the suffering population in the Gaza Strip.
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