The city of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians threatened by the war in Gaza have taken refuge, is the scene of intense Israeli strikes on Saturday at a time when diplomacy is trying to impose a new truce against a backdrop of regional conflagration.
Shortly after midnight, an AFP journalist heard powerful strikes in this town bordering Egypt, at the southern tip of the Gaza Strip. In the process, the Hamas Ministry of Health announced the deaths of 14 people in strikes on two different residences in the eastern part of Rafah.
In recent weeks, Israeli operations have been concentrated in the neighboring town of Khan Younes, the second largest in the territory where, according to the Israeli army, the local command of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas is hiding.
PHOTO SAID KHATIB, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Palestinian refugees in Rafah receive food.
In the rain, thousands of residents continued to flee the fighting and Israeli bombardments by car, on foot, by bicycle or on donkey carts to try to protect themselves in Rafah, where more than 1 .3 million of the approximately 2.4 million inhabitants of the microterritory threatened in the middle of winter by famine and epidemics, according to the UN.
While the war knows no respite, diplomacy is trying to negotiate a second truce, longer than that of one week, negotiated under the aegis of Qatar, Egypt and the United States and which allowed at the end of November the release of around a hundred Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
Towards a second truce?
The leader of Hamas, Ismaïl Haniyeh, based in Qatar, is still expected in Egypt to discuss a proposal developed during a meeting at the end of January in Paris between the head of the CIA, William Burns, and Egyptian officials , Israelis and Qataris.
According to a Hamas source, the proposal involves three phases, the first of which provides for a six-week truce during which Israel will have to release 200 to 300 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 35 to 40 hostages held in Gaza, and 200 to 300 trucks of aid will be able to enter the territory every day.
In recent days, Qatar reported “first” signs of support for the truce from Hamas, but the Palestinian Islamist movement then claimed to have not yet made a decision on this truce proposal, wishing for a ceasefire and not another pause.
The proposal was “approved by the Israeli side,” Qatari diplomatic spokesperson Majed al-Ansari said this week.
Israel continues to affirm that it will only end its offensive in Gaza once the Islamist movement has been eliminated, the hostages freed and after having received guarantees on the future security of its territory.
The war was sparked by an unprecedented attack carried out by Hamas commandos from the neighboring Gaza Strip on Israeli soil, which killed more than 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count from official Israeli data.
In response to the attack, Israel vowed to “annihilate” Hamas, which took power in Gaza in 2007, and launched a military offensive that left 27,131 people dead, the vast majority civilians, according to a latest report. assessment of the Hamas Ministry of Health.
Blinken and Séjourné tours
The truce project must also be at the heart of a new tour of the Middle East by American Secretary of State Antony Blinken, starting on Sunday, and which will take him to Qatar, Egypt, Israel and the occupied West Bank. and in Saudi Arabia. The head of American diplomacy will push for the release of hostages in exchange for a “humanitarian pause”, the State Department has confirmed.
The new French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stéphane Séjourné, begins his first tour in the region on Saturday which will take him to Egypt, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.
This tour aims to “work for a ceasefire and the release of hostages” and “convince us to reopen a political perspective” based on the two-state solution, a viable State of Palestine alongside Israel, said the spokesperson for the ministry, Christophe Lemoine.
MM. Blinken and Séjourné will land in a Middle East in dire straits with the extension of the war in Gaza into a broader conflict between Israel and its allies on the one hand and the “axis of resistance” led by Israel on the other. Iran and affiliated movements such as, in addition to Palestinian Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah, Iraqi militias and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
PHOTO KENT NISHIMURA, THE NEW YORK TIMES
President Joe Biden
The United States carried out overnight strikes against elite Iranian forces and pro-Iranian groups in Iraq and Syria, in retaliation for an attack on Sunday in Jordan that killed three American soldiers and attributed by Washington to groups supported by Iran.
A total of 85 targets on seven different sites (three in Iraq and four in Syria) were targeted according to Washington. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH), at least 18 pro-Iranian fighters were killed in eastern Syria alone.
From Yemen, Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility for firing ballistic missiles towards southern Israel. The Israeli army, for its part, assured that it had intercepted a missile which was approaching its territory in the Red Sea.