US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Saudi Arabia on Monday, the first stop on his tour of the Middle East to try to achieve a new truce in the deadly fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Mr. Blinken, whose country is Israel’s main supporter, is making his fifth trip to the region since the war began on October 7. After Riyadh, he must go to Qatar, Egypt, Israel and the occupied West Bank.
As the war enters its fifth month on Wednesday, 128 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, were killed in 24 hours, announced the Hamas Ministry of Health.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has accused the Israeli army of a naval strike on a food aid convoy preparing to enter northern Gaza.
“We’ll take care of it.”
For its part, the army indicated that it had carried out “targeted raids” in the north and center of the territory, and killed “dozens of terrorists who were setting up ambushes” in Khan Younes. It has been shelling the city for weeks, claiming that leaders of the Palestinian Islamist movement are hiding there.
She announced on Sunday that she had taken over a complex used by Hamas as a training center to prepare for the bloody attack of October 7.
The war was sparked that day by an unprecedented Hamas attack on Israeli soil, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official data. Israelis.
In response, Israel launched a military offensive which left 27,478 dead, the vast majority of them civilians, according to a report released Monday by the Palestinian movement’s Ministry of Health.
In Rafah, further south, Hamas also reported Israeli strikes. In this city, which had 270,000 inhabitants before the war, according to the UN, there are now more than 1.3 million people who fled the fighting which devastated the besieged territory.
The overcrowded city, located on the closed border with Egypt, could be the next objective of Israel which says it wants to “annihilate” the Islamist movement, classified as a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the European Union.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assured that the army had destroyed the majority of Hamas “battalions”.
“Most of those who remain are in the southern Gaza Strip and Rafah, and we will take care of them,” he added.
American frustration
At the same time, negotiations continue to reach a second truce, after that of a week at the end of November. Around a hundred hostages held in Gaza were then exchanged for Palestinians held by Israel.
Some 250 people were kidnapped on October 7 and 132 hostages are still being held in Gaza, according to Israel. Among them, 28 were declared dead by the Prime Minister’s office.
During his tour, Mr. Blinken will support the project drawn up by the Qatari, American and Egyptian mediators in Paris at the end of January, which must still be approved by Hamas and Israel.
The United States continues to support “Israel’s right to defend itself” but displays growing frustration with the Israeli government.
In Israel, Mr. Blinken will try to increase the delivery of food, water and medicine to the Gaza Strip where the humanitarian situation is disastrous according to NGOs.
On January 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court of the UN, called on the Israeli authorities to take “immediate measures” to allow the provision of aid “which the Palestinians urgently need” .
According to a Hamas source, the proposal notably provides for a six-week truce with the release of 35 to 40 hostages in exchange for 200 to 300 Palestinian detainees.
Hamas, which took power in Gaza in 2007, is demanding a complete ceasefire. This is what Benjamin Netanyahu refuses despite pressure from the families of the hostages who demonstrate almost daily to demand the release of their loved ones.
Attack in Syria
The war in Gaza has caused renewed tension in the occupied West Bank where the Palestinian Authority accuses extremist settlers of deadly violence against Palestinians.
“Settler violence must stop,” said the head of French diplomacy, Stéphane Séjourné, on Monday, visiting Israel as part of a regional tour. “There can under no circumstances be any forced displacement of Palestinians, neither outside Gaza nor outside the West Bank,” he added after meeting Mr. Netanyahu.
Furthermore, tensions are still high in Syria, where at least seven fighters from the Kurdish-led anti-jihadist forces were killed in a drone attack on an American base in the east of the country, according to an NGO.
The attack, claimed Monday by the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq”, a nebula of pro-Iranian groups, comes after retaliatory strikes carried out by the United States against elite Iranian forces and pro-Iranian armed groups in Syria and Iraq, which left at least 45 dead.
Washington was responding to the death of three American soldiers in an attack attributed to pro-Iranian groups on January 28 against a base in Jordan.
An emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on these American strikes is scheduled for Monday in New York.