The government of Israel he insists on announcing that he plans to launch “strong” military operation in Rafah, where more than a million displaced Palestinians have taken refuge, despite international warnings, which continued today, and against the backdrop of negotiations – on the back burner now – for the declaration of a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.
Israel’s army also fired yesterday Wednesday series of plagues in southern Lebanon with at least nine dead, according to Lebanese sources, in retaliation for the launch of a rocket that killed a female soldier, increasing the concern that the Israel/Hamas war will spread to the region.
Israel’s chief of staff, Herchi Halevi, during a visit to the north of the country yesterday, threatened a “very strong attack” soon against the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, an ally of Iran and Hamas.
“We will fight until total victory, which entails a strong operation in Rafah, after allowing the civilian population to leave the battle zones,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said via Telegram.
In the current period,hostilities are concentrated in the southern part of the besieged and largely leveled Gaza Strip, especially in Khan Younis, where thousands of forcibly displaced people have taken refuge in Nasser Hospital, but it is surrounded. Moreover, operations and bombings are already taking place in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, which always remains closed.
About 1.4 million people, according to the UN, or in other words more than half the enclave’s population, are crammed into Rafah, which has been turned into a giant refugee camp. Many of them are worried about the attack that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been announcing for days.
“Nowhere to Go”
After the US, Israel’s main ally, insisted it opposed an attack on Rafah without “guarantees” of civilian safety, Australia, New Zealand and Canada today warned the Netanyahu government against conducting an operation in Rafah, which it would be “disastrous”, as they pointed out.
The nearly 1.5 million Gazans there “simply have nowhere to go”, stressed the joint statement of the prime ministers of the three Commonwealth countries, who called on their Israeli counterpart “not to take this road”.
French President Emmanuel Macron raised the tone, announcing that he had told Mr. Netanyahu during their telephone conversation that Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip must be “ended” as soon as possible, as “the casualty count” and “the humanitarian situation” have now reached “unbearable” levels.
Negotiations to declare a new truce that would allow the release of more Hamas hostages in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned in Israel continue in Cairo, brokered by Qatar and Egypt.
After a meeting on Tuesday mainly attended by the head of Mossad – Israel’s intelligence agency – David Barnea, CIA Director William Burns, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdel Rahman al-Thani and Egyptian officials, the talks are expected to last until tomorrow Friday.
An AFP source in Hamas said that a delegation of the movement was expected in Cairo yesterday for contacts with Qatari and Egyptian officials.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke in a statement of “delusional demands by Hamas” which he said precluded any progress in the negotiations, without being more specific.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who rules autonomous areas in the occupied West Bank but not the Gaza Strip, from where Hamas ousted it in 2007, called on the Palestinian Islamist movement yesterday to strike a deal to declare a truce “quickly”. “, to “avoid”, as he sees it, an Israeli attack on Rafah, which will have “thousands of victims”.
Desperate situation in hospitals
According to Israeli sources, more than 130 Israeli hostages remain in the hands of Hamas in the Gaza Strip – although an army spokesman said last week that at least 31 of them are believed to be dead – of the approximately 250 kidnapped on October 7. A week-long truce in November allowed the release of more than 100 hostages and in return 240 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
The International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC) expressed once again today the “her great concern” for the “hostages held in Gaza for over four months”.
The war broke out on October 7 when members of the Palestinian Islamist movement’s military wing Hamas launched an unprecedented raid from the Gaza Strip against southern sectors of the Israeli territory, killing more than 1,160 people, most of them civilians, according to a count of AFP based on official data from the Israeli authorities.
In retaliation, Israel, whose civilian-military leadership vows to “eliminate” Hamas and release “all” hostages, is conducting large-scale military operations in the Palestinian enclave that have so far killed at least 28,576 people, the vast majority of them women and children, according to the latest casualty count released by the Hamas Health Ministry.
Rafah is the main gateway for humanitarian aid reaching the Gaza Strip, the amount of which is a drop in the ocean of needs of the population, which is now threatened, as the UN World Food Program (WFP) warns, by “famine”.
The World Health Organization (WHO) once again denounced the situation in the Gaza Strip yesterday, which are “completely overwhelmed”, are “suffocatingly full” and do not even have “adequate supplies”. Staff are forced to carry out amputations because they do not have the means to care for people with limb injuries, said the head of his office in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Dutch doctor Rick Peppercorn.
Source: RES-MPE
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