According to the UN, Israel has ordered further large-scale evacuations of the city of Khan Yunis in the south of the Gaza Strip. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Israel published maps on Wednesday in which around 20 percent of the city’s area was newly designated as an area to be evacuated.
According to the UN, more than 110,000 people lived in the area to be evacuated before the fighting began between Israel and the Islamist Palestinian organization Hamas. There are also 32 emergency shelters in the area with more than 140,000 internally displaced people, most of them from the north of the Gaza Strip.
Negotiations stall
However, talks regarding a new ceasefire do not seem to be getting off the ground. Both parties to the conflict reiterated their positions. After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once more announced the destruction of Hamas as a war goal on Wednesday evening, the terrorist organization reiterated its condition for the release of Israeli hostages. “There is a Palestinian national decision that there should be no talks on prisoners or exchange agreements except following a complete cessation of aggression,” the terror group said in a statement yesterday.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniya held talks in Egypt on Wednesday regarding a new prisoner exchange, but according to media reports these remained inconclusive. Israel held talks with the US and Qatar on this matter.
Meanwhile, the situation in the northern Gaza Strip, which is controlled by the Israeli army, is catastrophic. The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday that there was no longer an operational hospital in the area. There was a lack of fuel, staff and materials, said the WHO representative in the Gaza Strip, Richard Peeperkorn, in an online press conference. Patients would die not just because of a lack of medical care. “They are starving and dying of thirst,” WHO aid coordinator Sean Casey reported in a video link from Rafah. In the entire Gaza Strip, only nine of 36 health facilities are still in operation.
Against this background, Great Britain pushed for more aid deliveries by ship. Work is underway to ensure that British ships can bring aid supplies from Cyprus to Gaza in the future, said British Foreign Secretary David Cameron following a meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri on Thursday. Everything that can be done must be done to help the people of the Gaza Strip, stressed Cameron. “Humanitarian aid is the absolute priority.”
On Wednesday evening, French President Emmanuel Macron also spoke out in a television interview and told Israel that fighting terrorism does not mean “razing everything in Gaza to the ground.”
Death toll in Lebanon
According to Lebanese sources, a woman was killed in Israeli artillery fire in southern Lebanon on Thursday. The Lebanese news agency NNA reported that her husband was also injured in a direct hit on her house in the border town of Marun al-Ras. Both are older people in their 70s.
The Israeli army confirmed artillery attacks in Lebanon. During the night and morning, the air force once more attacked positions belonging to the Shiite militia Hezbollah. “Terrorist infrastructure” and a rocket launch pad were hit.
New water pipeline for Gaza from Egypt
A new pipeline supplies the Gaza Strip with water from Egypt. As the official news agency of the United Arab Emirates (WAM) announced, around 2,271 cubic meters of seawater from the Mediterranean will be processed every day by three desalination plants.
This might provide up to 300,000 people in the Gaza Strip with water. The desalination plants are connected to the Gaza Strip via a 900-meter-long pipeline from Egypt, the news agency reported. The systems were financed by the United Arab Emirates. A few days ago, a delegation from the UN Security Council visited the border town of Rafah. The children’s aid organization UNICEF reported on Wednesday that there was a catastrophic water supply for hundreds of thousands in the Gaza Strip.
