The head of American diplomacy, Antony Blinken, continues his tour of the Middle East on Tuesday to try to impose a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, besieged and devastated after four months of war.
Mr. Blinken, who began this fifth tour in Saudi Arabia on Monday since the start of the war on October 7, met President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi in Egypt on Tuesday before leaving for Qatar, then continuing his trip to Israel and in the occupied West Bank.
Bombings and fighting rage meanwhile in the Palestinian territory, where the Hamas Ministry of Health counted 107 dead in 24 hours. Israeli strikes hit the towns of Khan Younes and Rafah in the south, according to an AFP journalist.
The army indicated that it was engaged in “close combat” in Khan Younes, a city largely transformed into a field of ruins, accused by Israel of being a stronghold of the Palestinian Islamist movement.
Strikes also target the city of Rafah, in the far south of the territory, where more than 1.3 million people who have fled the fighting, five times its initial population, are crowded together in desperate conditions, according to the UN. out of a total of 2.4 million inhabitants in the Gaza Strip.
Rafah threatened
The city 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.
On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned that the army would “reach places where it has not yet fought […] to the last bastion of Hamas, namely Rafah.
The army “leaves us no other choice than death or displacement. They killed children, families, destroyed our homes, streets and towns,” testifies Riham Sharrab, a 21-year-old woman who fled Khan Younes to take refuge in Rafah.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Netanyahu threatens to invade Rafah and uses the presence of Hamas as an excuse. But the goal is to destroy Rafah because it is the only place that the occupation (Israel, Editor’s note) has not yet destroyed. Israel will only stop when it has annihilated the people of Gaza,” says Raed al-Bardani, a 32-year-old displaced person.
Thousands of civilians arrive every day in this overcrowded city, backed by the closed border with Egypt, where they have only 1.5 to 2 liters of water each per day for drinking, cooking and washing, according to the UN.
In Israel, Mr. Blinken must notably insist on the urgency of letting aid enter the Gaza Strip.
In the territory plunged into a major humanitarian crisis, the fate of several hospitals, surrounded by fighting and housing thousands of displaced people, is a particular source of concern.
Around 300 people, including the elderly, the sick and staff, are still in one of the large hospitals of Khan Younes, al-Amal, after the evacuation of 8,000 people on Monday, said the Red Cross in Geneva. .
A “lasting” truce
Monday in Riyadh, the American Secretary of State spoke with the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, about the necessary “regional cooperation to achieve a lasting end” to the war in Gaza, according to a spokesperson for the department of state.
The war was triggered on October 7 by an unprecedented attack on Israeli soil by Hamas commandos infiltrated from Gaza, which led to the death of more than 1,160 people, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count carried out in from official Israeli data.
In response, Israel launched an offensive which left 27,585 people dead in the Gaza Strip, the vast majority of them civilians, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health.
At the end of November, a first one-week truce allowed the increased entry of humanitarian aid, the release of around a hundred hostages, out of the approximately 250 taken to Gaza on October 7, and Palestinian prisoners.
According to Israel, 132 hostages are still held in Gaza, of whom 28 are believed to have died.
Mr. Blinken now supports a truce plan by Qatari, American and Egyptian mediators drawn up in Paris at the end of January, which must still be approved by Hamas and Israel.
According to a Hamas source, the proposal provides for a six-week truce during which Israel will release 200 to 300 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 35 to 40 hostages held in Gaza, and 200 to 300 aid trucks will be able to enter the country every day. territory.
However, Hamas, in power in Gaza since 2007, demands a total ceasefire. Israel, for its part, continues to affirm that it will only definitively end its offensive once the Islamist movement has been eliminated and the hostages freed.
The conflict in Gaza has also spread across the region with tensions between Israel and its allies on one side, and Iran and allied groups on the other including the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, Iraqi militias and rebels. Houthis of Yemen.
The Houthis announced on Tuesday that they had targeted American and British ships in two new attacks in the Red Sea.
The head of Dutch diplomacy, Hanke Bruins Slot, called from Iraq “all parties” to initiate regional de-escalation, after American strikes in Syria and Iraq in response to the death of three American soldiers, killed on the 28 January in Jordan.