2023-12-15 07:37:06
Early this Friday, the Hamas Ministry of Health reported “dozens of dead and wounded” in new airstrikes in Khan Younes, the new epicenter of the war in the south of the Gaza Strip. And on Thursday evening, the Israeli military reported “fighting” on the ground in the Choujaya sector (north), where their army had suffered its biggest losses earlier this week since the start of its ground offensive in this small, densely populated Palestinian territory. .
In Gaza, subject to incessant bombardments, during the night, telecommunications remained cut once once more, according to the Palestinian operator Paltel, attributing this cut “to the ongoing aggression” of Israeli forces.
The attack carried out by Hamas on Israeli soil on October 7 left around 1,200 dead, mostly civilians, according to the authorities. Since then, the death toll in Gaza is now approaching 18,800 people, 70% of them women, children and adolescents, killed by Israeli bombings, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health.
“Only a few months left”
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan arrived in Israel on Thursday, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. He discussed the possibility of a shift in the “near future” of the offensive towards “lower intensity operations” to reduce the number of civilian casualties, the White House said. The Israeli Defense Minister warned that the war once morest Hamas would last “more than a few months”.
Hamas leader Ismaïl Haniyeh, in exile in Qatar, on Wednesday described any post-war plan that imagines the Gaza Strip without his organization and other “resistance movements” as an “illusion”. According to a poll by the Center for Palestinian Policy and Polling Research (PCPSR), an independent institute in Ramallah, 64% of Palestinians surveyed believe that Hamas will retain control of Gaza following the fighting, a scenario they say is more likely than a return of the Palestinian Authority.
In recent weeks, Israel has suggested that its goal is not to administer Gaza following the war, while commentators have questioned the possibility of the Palestinian Authority managing the territory from which it was driven in 2007 by Hamas. Envoy Jake Sullivan is also going to Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, on Friday for talks with leaders of the Palestinian Authority, said a senior American official on condition of anonymity.
Rafah, gigantic camp
In the Gaza Strip, civilians are forced into increasingly cramped areas, seeking to escape Israeli strikes and facing desperate humanitarian conditions. In the far south, the town of Rafah, which has also not been spared from the bombings, has become a gigantic camp, made of hundreds of tents cobbled together using pieces of wood, sheets and plastic tarpaulins. , where the displaced shelter as best they can in the rain, as winter and cold set in.
On Thursday night, new Israeli airstrikes once more hit the city. “It is a refugee camp, with houses connected together. As you see, they are destroyed. It’s a residential area which has nothing to do with combatant activities,” complained Abou Omar, a resident of the area.
In the Gaza Strip, subject to an Israeli blockade for 16 years and a total siege since October 9, around 1.9 million people, or 85% of the population, have been displaced, many several times since the start of war, according to the UN. While aid trickles into the Palestinian territory, deprived by Israel of any supply of water, food, electricity, medicine or fuel, overpopulation in the camps leads to illness, in addition to hunger and lack of care, deplore UN organizations and humanitarian NGOs.
Invading Israeli tanks and planes intensify bombardment of Gaza, killing four Palestinians, and a UN official says nine out of 10 Palestinians are not eating enough and half of the besieged enclave’s population is starving
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On the sidelines of the war in Gaza, Israeli operations have intensified in the occupied West Bank, where Hamas is not represented, and where an Israeli raid left eleven dead on Thursday according to the Palestinian Authority, bringing the number to more than 280 of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers since October 7.
The Yemeni Houthi rebels, supporters of Hamas, have claimed responsibility for firing in the Red Sea once morest a container ship which they say was heading towards Israel. This strike missed the ship, an American official said, with the army assuring “that there were no injuries or damage”.
By Le360 (with AFP)
12/15/2023 at 7:30 a.m.
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