Israel said on Monday that no truce was in place to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, where a million desperate Palestinians have massed on the border with Egypt, fleeing bombings launched by the Israeli army in response to the bloody Hamas attack.
“Civilians should not have to suffer from the atrocities of Hamas,” said American Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who returned to Israel on Monday after a tour of several Arab countries, on the tenth day of the war which has already claimed thousands of lives. of deaths.
Responding to the attack of unprecedented scale launched on October 7 by the Palestinian Islamist movement, Israel promised to “annihilate” Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip since 2007, and launched an intense campaign of strikes on the territory, before calling on civilians to flee Gaza City in anticipation of a ground offensive.
This scenario, the risk of an extension of the conflict and the humanitarian disaster hitting the population in this microterritory already undermined by poverty, worries the international community.
On Monday, the Arab League demanded an end to “military operations” in Gaza and the establishment of humanitarian corridors.
More than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Israel since the attack. Hamas also captured 199 hostages, according to Israel.
Israeli retaliations have killed at least 2,750 people in Gaza, the majority Palestinian civilians, including hundreds of children, according to local authorities.
“No electricity, no water”
The Israeli army indicated that it would “refrain” from striking the evacuation corridors linking the north to the south of the Gaza Strip on Monday morning. But both Israel and Hamas have denied reports of a truce.
“There is no ceasefire and no entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza,” said the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel has been urging residents of northern Gaza, around 1.1 million people out of a total of 2.4 million, to flee south since Friday, saying it would strike Gaza City to destroy Hamas’s center of operations.
“We are at the start of large-scale military operations in Gaza City,” located in the north, army spokesperson Jonathan Conricus said on Monday. “Civilians would not be safe if they stayed here,” he warned.
More than a million people have already left their homes in this 362 square kilometer territory, placed under siege, wedged between Israel, the Mediterranean and Egypt.
Carrying a few hastily packed belongings, on motorbikes, in cars, in trailers or on donkeys, streams of Palestinians headed south.
“No electricity, no water, no Internet. I feel like I’m losing my humanity,” says Mona Abdel Hamid, a 55-year-old Palestinian. She reached Rafah, on the Egyptian border currently closed, where humanitarian aid is flowing from several countries without being able to pass.
At the Rafah crossing point, the only opening of the Gaza Strip to the outside world, controlled by Egypt, “a makeshift camp has been set up,” William Schombug, an official of the International Committee of the Cross, said on Monday. Red.
“People lack food, electricity and water to meet their basic needs,” he said, adding that the ICRC needed “security and supplies”.
Tension is also very high on the northern border with Lebanon, where Israel began on Monday to evacuate thousands of inhabitants in 28 localities after deadly clashes in recent days between pro-Iranian Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, and Israeli army.
On Sunday, an Israeli civilian was killed and several injured in Shtula, northern Israel, by a Hezbollah missile strike. The army responded by striking military infrastructure of the Lebanese Shiite movement. The headquarters of the UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon was hit by a rocket.
A “serious error”
At dawn on October 7, in the middle of Shabbat, the weekly Jewish rest, hundreds of Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel by land and air, killing more than a thousand civilians and sowing terror under a barrage of rockets. . About 270 people, authorities said, were shot or burned in their cars when the fighters burst into a music festival.
Hamas, classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel, kidnapped 199 people during the attack, according to Israel, which announced that it had found “corpses” of hostages during incursions into Gaza. The Palestinian movement reported 22 hostages killed in Israeli raids.
The presence of these hostages on Gaza soil makes any ground offensive even more complicated, a terrifying prospect of fighting in the heart of a city with an extremely dense population, with a basement dotted with underground passages.
In response to the attack, the deadliest against its territory since the creation of Israel in 1948, Israel massed tens of thousands of soldiers around the Gaza Strip, which has since been shelled without respite. The army announced that it had recovered the bodies of 1,500 Hamas fighters on Israeli soil.
US President Joe Biden once again called for calm and warned that a new Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip would be a “grave mistake”.
Israel occupied Gaza from the Six Day War in 1967 to 2005.
The United States, as well as Germany, also called on Iran, an ally of Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah, not to expand the conflict.
“Humanitarian disaster”
In Gaza, an “unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe” is underway, said the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
Subject to an Israeli land, air and sea blockade since Hamas took power there in 2007, the Gaza Strip has been placed under complete siege since October 9 by Israel, which has cut off water supplies there, electricity and food.
“Not a drop of water, not a grain of wheat, not a liter of fuel has been allowed to enter Gaza in the last eight days,” said Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA.
The UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian Territories, Lynn Hastings, regretted that Israel “associates humanitarian aid to Gaza with the release of hostages”.
The only glimmer of hope is that water has returned to certain localities in the south of the territory, where the situation remains very complicated.
“Every day we think about how to save water. If we take a shower, we won’t drink water,” regrets Assem, a resident of Khan Younès.
“Look at the massive destruction. They claim there is terrorism here,” shouts Alaa al-Hams, pointing to the rubble of a house bombed on Sunday in Rafah. “Where is the humanity they talk about? Here, all are civilians, unrelated to any group, but they are all dead.”
On the other side of the Israeli fence surrounding the Gaza Strip, residents of the Israeli town of Sderot are also evacuated.
” It’s hard […] the fear with each alert, you have to leave, it’s better for the children,” says Helen Afteker, 50 years old.