(Rafah) International aid desperately awaited by the Palestinians in Gaza is accumulating on Friday near the border with Egypt, and may not enter the small besieged and deprived territory before Saturday, on the 14e day of the war between Israel and Palestinian Hamas.
More than 1,400 people were killed on October 7 on Israeli territory by Hamas men, the majority of them civilians who were shot, burned alive or died of mutilation on the day of the deadly Hamas attack, according to the Israeli authorities. Around 1,500 Hamas fighters were killed in the counter-offensive which allowed Israel to regain control of the attacked areas, according to the Israeli army. Hamas kidnapped 203 hostages, including foreigners from more than twenty countries.
On the Palestinian side, 3,785 people including at least 1,524 children were killed in the Gaza Strip, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health. Entire neighborhoods have been razed and are left without water, food or electricity, and more than a million people have been displaced after the siege imposed by Israel on October 9 on the Gaza Strip, already subject to a land blockade. , maritime and air since Hamas took power there in 2007.
“Drop of water in the ocean”
Humanitarian aid should be able to enter the Gaza Strip “tomorrow (Saturday) or those waters,” UN emergency chief Martin Griffiths said on Friday.
Dozens of trucks have been waiting for days at the Egyptian border, near the Rafah crossing point, to go to the Gaza Strip, where 2.4 million Palestinians live. On Friday, concrete blocks installed by the Egyptians after Israel’s bombings on this border with Gaza were removed, seeming to indicate an imminent opening.
PHOTO AMR ABDALLAH DALSH, REUTERS
Egyptian tanks near the Rafah crossing point
The Egyptian channel AlQahera News, close to Egyptian intelligence, said Thursday evening that the Rafah crossing point, the only one not controlled by Israel, would open on Friday.
In Geneva, the emergency director of the World Health Organization (WHO) described the agreement reached by US President Joe Biden and Egypt as a “drop in the ocean of needs”. authorize the entry of 20 trucks. “It would take 2,000 trucks,” Michael Ryan said.
Israel is still preparing for a ground offensive in Gaza after the deadliest attack in its 75-year history. Wearing a bulletproof vest, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited troops on the front lines near Gaza, urging them to “fight like lions” and “win with all the force necessary.”
“Gaza from within”
“You now see Gaza from afar, soon you will see Gaza from within,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant added Thursday during an inspection of troops stationed near Gaza.
This military escalation risks being “simply catastrophic,” warned the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, on Friday.
The horrors of the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7 and the following days are still emerging, as traumatized residents tell their stories.
Shachar Butler, security chief of Kibbutz Nir Oz, where Hamas men killed or kidnapped a quarter of the 400 residents, remembers more than a dozen gunmen firing bullets indiscriminately and throwing grenades on the houses. “It’s unimaginable,” the forty-year-old told AFP, as part of a trip organized by the Israeli army.
PHOTO FRANCISCO SECO, ASSOCIATED PRESS
On Kibbutz Nir Oz, Hamas men killed or kidnapped a quarter of the 400 residents.
“Every time someone tried to touch my window, I would shoot them,” he said. “The people who came out were kidnapped, killed, executed, massacred,” he added.
In Washington, Joe Biden urged the United States to take the initiative in supporting Israel and Ukraine (at war against Russia which invaded its territory), indicating that he would present an “urgent” request for aid in Congress on Friday, during a solemn address to the nation the day before.
After a whirlwind trip to Israel on Wednesday, Mr. Biden hopes to rule out the possibility of an extension of the conflict in the Middle East. The United States has already deployed two aircraft carriers in the Eastern Mediterranean, in order to deter Iran or Lebanese Hezbollah, both allies of Hamas, from getting involved in the conflict.
An American destroyer “operating in the northern Red Sea” on Thursday shot down three surface-to-surface missiles and several drones “potentially heading towards targets in Israel” and launched by Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Pentagon announced.
Fears of regional conflict
Israel announced on Friday the evacuation of Kyriat Shmona, a town of 25,000 inhabitants on its northern border with Lebanon under high tension after days of clashes with Hezbollah fighters along the border.
For their part, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi and King Abdullah II of Jordan, two key players in the Middle East, warned that the conflict could spread and condemned what they called “punishment collective” for the inhabitants of Gaza.
Fadwa Al-Najjar, 38, told AFP on Friday that she had walked 30 kilometers with her family after an Israeli order to evacuate Gaza City and the north of the small territory particularly targeted by bombings: “We tried to rest on the way, but the shelling was intense, so we started running.”
Egypt will host a summit on the Palestinian question on Saturday attended by several heads of state or government, as well as the President of the European Council, Charles Michel.
Israel and Hamas continued to blame each other for deadly strikes, the latest of which hit a church in Gaza late Thursday. The Hamas-controlled Palestinian Interior Ministry said people sheltering in the church were killed and others injured, blaming an Israeli strike.
Witnesses said the strike appeared to have targeted a target close to the place of worship where many Gazans are sheltering as the war rages between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement.
The Israeli army admitted on Friday to having carried out an air raid in the area the day before, adding that it had “attacked the command and control center of a Hamas terrorist involved in firing rockets and mortars towards Israel”.