US President Joe Biden assured Israel of his support on Wednesday during a visit to the country after a strike on a hospital in Gaza for which Israel and the Palestinians blame each other, which left hundreds dead and caused a wind of anger in the Muslim world.
Arab countries have accused Israel, which has been relentlessly shelling the Gaza Strip since the start of the war triggered on October 7 by the bloody attack on its soil by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.
But Joe Biden supported the Israeli version designating a rocket attack from Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian armed group.
Islamic Jihad has denied this and accused Israel of “lies”. Hamas, in power in Gaza, also designated Israel.
“From 200 to 300” people died on Tuesday at the Ahli Arab hospital in central Gaza, according to the Palestinian territory’s Ministry of Health, while Hamas speaks of more than 500 deaths.
“I was deeply saddened and shocked by the explosion in the hospital in Gaza. And based on what I’ve seen, it appears that this was carried out by the opposing side,” Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The Americans cry with you,” he said, asserting that Hamas has brought nothing but “suffering” to the Palestinians.
The shooting sparked numerous condemnations and angry demonstrations in Tehran, Amman, Istanbul, Tunis and even Beirut.
The “civilized world” must unite against Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu told Joe Biden.
The American president was also expected to try to unblock the entry of emergency aid into Gaza, while the Rafah crossing point, on the border with Egypt, remains closed.
Hundreds of humanitarian aid trucks are still waiting in Rafah, on the Egyptian side, to be able to enter the Gaza Strip where hundreds of thousands of desperate Palestinian civilians are massed.
The situation in the territory is “getting out of control,” said the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
” A massacre “
Israel said on Wednesday it had “evidence” of Islamic Jihad’s responsibility in the strike on the Gaza hospital.
“The evidence, which we share with all of you, confirms that the explosion at a hospital in Gaza was caused by the firing of a failed Islamic Jihad rocket,” army spokesman Daniel Hagari said. .
“This professional analysis is based on intelligence, operational systems and aerial imagery, all of which have been cross-referenced,” he added.
According to Islamic Jihad, a group allied with Hamas, classified like it as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel, the hospital had been ordered by Israel to evacuate under the threat of bombing, and it It was a bomb dropped by an Israeli army plane that caused the tragedy.
“We were operating in the hospital, there was a loud explosion and the ceiling fell on the operating room. It’s a massacre,” said Dr.r Ghassan Abu Sittah, from the NGO Doctors Without Borders.
Images circulating on social networks and verified by AFP show burning rubble on the hospital site. Ambulance sirens are heard in the background.
The Episcopal Church in Jerusalem, which runs the hospital, denounced it as a “crime against humanity”.
“Day of anger”
Lebanese Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, called for a “day of anger” to be observed on Wednesday to condemn the “massacre”, of which it accuses Israel.
In Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, clashes broke out on Tuesday evening between demonstrators calling for the departure of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his security forces.
The Palestinian Red Crescent denounced a “war crime”, which caused “hundreds” of civilian victims, “including women, children, health personnel”.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, expected Thursday in Egypt, bordering the Gaza Strip, to discuss humanitarian aid, called for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raïssi declared a day of “public mourning” on Wednesday and predicted that this attack would turn against Israel and its American ally. On Tuesday, Tehran threatened possible “preventive action” against Israel, which is preparing a ground offensive in Gaza.
The war was sparked on October 7 by a Hamas attack on Israel, unprecedented since the country’s creation in 1948. Hundreds of Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel from the Gaza Strip, by land and air, sowing destruction. terror.
Israel responded with an intense campaign of strikes on the Gaza Strip and promised to “annihilate” the Islamist movement.
These strikes have already left more than 3,000 dead in the Gaza Strip, mostly civilians, including hundreds of children, according to local authorities.
More than 1,400 people have died in Israel since the start of the war, most of them civilians killed on the day of the Hamas attack, which also kidnapped 199 people according to the Israeli army.
Israel also announced that it had recovered the bodies of 1,500 Hamas fighters after their incursion.
Intense negotiations involving several countries are underway to try to free the hostages. According to Hamas, more than twenty of them were killed in Israeli strikes.
Rafah still closed
Water and food are lacking for the 2.4 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, also deprived of electricity, after the siege imposed by Israel since October 9 on the small territory of 362 square kilometers, already subject to a land, sea and air blockade since Hamas took power there in 2007.
A million Palestinians, according to the UN, fled the bombings and responded to a call for evacuation from the north launched by the Israeli army, to mass in the south near Rafah, the only exit from Gaza that is not not controlled by Israel.
While the Israeli army has deployed tens of thousands of troops around the Palestinian territory and along the border with Lebanon, nearly 500,000 Israeli civilians have also been evacuated away from the combat zones, according to the army .
Tension is also high on the border with Lebanon, where there are daily exchanges of fire between the Israeli army and Hezbollah, as well as in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 by Israel.
The UN Security Council is due to meet on Wednesday.