Gaza:
Palestinian resistance group Hamas battled invading Israeli forces in and around Gaza’s main cities on Friday, as Israel stepped up its offensive in the conflict that has left thousands of Palestinians dead and left the besieged area in ruins.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said the death toll in Gaza has risen to more than 17,000, mostly women and children, with the vast area transformed into a wasteland strewn with the debris of buildings damaged by bombing and gunfire.
Early Friday, the Health Ministry reported 40 more people killed in attacks near Gaza City, and “dozens” more in Jabaliya and Khan Yunis.
Palestinian poet Refaat Alerer, one of the leaders of the young generation of writers in Gaza who chose to write in English to tell their stories, was killed in an Israeli strike, his friends said Thursday night.
Israeli forces have claimed to have surrounded major urban centers as they seek to destroy Hamas. However, resistance fighters continued to fight back and inflict losses on the attacking forces.
In a phone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, US President Joe Biden “stressed the critical need to protect civilians and disengage the civilian population from Hamas,” the White House said in a statement.
Biden also called for “corridors that allow people to move safely through defined areas of hostilities”.
Backed by air power, tanks and armored bulldozers, Israeli troops are fighting in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza’s largest city, as well as Gaza City and the Jabaliya district in the north.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that troops had closed in on the Khan Yunis home of Hamas Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar, 61, adding that “it is only a matter of time until we find him.” “.
Israeli television stations on Thursday broadcast footage of blindfolded Palestinian men wearing only underwear under the protection of Israeli troops in Gaza, drawing strong reactions on social media. Reports indicate that the men were captured from a nearby school, where they were taking shelter with their families to escape brutal Israeli bombardment.
“We are investigating to see who is affiliated with Hamas and who is not,” Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari told a news conference.
The fighting has pushed Gazans southwards, turning Rafah near the Egyptian border into a sprawling camp for many of the 1.9 million people displaced by the conflict – 80 percent of Gaza’s population.
“Two months on the road, going from one place to another. These are the hardest two months of our lives,” said Abdullah Abu Dakka, displaced from Khan Yunis in Rafah.
There have been air strikes behind them.
Eight more people attacked Rafah overnight. AFP journalists saw about 20 corpses in white body bags, including a child, at its Nasser hospital, while men gathered nearby to pray.
Mass civilian casualties in the conflict have caused global concern, compounded by the severe shortages caused by the inhumane Israeli siege, which has seen limited access to food, water, fuel and medicines.
Israel has approved a “minimal” increase in fuel supplies to prevent “humanitarian degradation and the outbreak of the pandemic”.
UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said there were “promising signs” that Israel could open the southern Kerem Shalom crossing to aid deliveries.
Hamas has declared a “state of famine” in northern Gaza, saying no aid has arrived there since December 1.
Israeli rights group B’Tselem said the “modest amount of aid” given to the area “amounts to deliberately starving the population”.
“We are dying here, there is no need even for rocket and bomb attacks. We are already dead, dead of hunger, dead of displacement,” said Abdelkader, a Gaza City resident now in Rafah. Al-Haddad said.
The Netanyahu government has reacted angrily to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres invoking rarely used Article 99 of the world body’s charter and calling on the Security Council to press for a ceasefire.
Ecuador’s delegation, which holds the council presidency this month, said the UAE had prepared a draft resolution that would be put to a vote in the Security Council on Friday.
The latest version of the document, seen by AFP on Thursday, described the humanitarian situation in Gaza as “catastrophic” and called for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire.”
According to the Israeli military, 91 Israeli soldiers have been killed so far in the fighting in Gaza, the actual number is probably much higher. The army reported four more deaths on Thursday, including the son of war cabinet minister Gadi Eisenkot.
At Thursday’s briefing, the Israeli military claimed that troops “killed Hamas militants and attacked dozens of terror targets” in Khan Yunis, and raided a military compound of Hamas’s Central Jabaliya battalion.
Hamas said it was fighting Israeli troops “at all points of incursion into the Gaza Strip”.
In the West Bank city of Ramallah, Israeli security forces launched an operation early Friday, according to the Palestinian official news agency Wafa.
There have been almost daily exchanges along the UN-patrolled Israel-Lebanon border, mainly involving Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
The Israeli army has claimed that an anti-tank missile fired from Lebanon on Thursday killed a civilian in Israel.
Netanyahu warned Hezbollah that if it “choose to start a global war, it will turn Beirut and South Lebanon… into Gaza and Khan Yunis with its own hands”.
An investigation by Agence France-Presse into the October 13 attack in southern Lebanon that killed a Reuters journalist and wounded six others, including two from AFP, concluded that it involved only Israeli military use in the region. One tank shell was fired.
