More than 200 Palestinians have been killed in the past 24 hours in incessant Israeli bombings and ground operations in the Gaza Strip, Hamas said, after a UN resolution on humanitarian aid failed to reach a resolution. call for a ceasefire.
Nearly three months after the start of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, the latter announced the discovery of the bodies of dozens of killed Palestinians, some of whom he said were “executed” during an Israeli ground operation in Jabaliya in the north of the Gaza Strip.
It was an attack of unprecedented scale and violence carried out by Hamas commandos infiltrated into southern Israel from the neighboring Gaza Strip which triggered this latest war between the Palestinian group and the Israeli army.
The attack left around 1,140 people dead, the majority of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on the latest official Israeli figures. Palestinian fighters also kidnapped around 250 people, 129 of whom remain detained in Gaza according to Israel.
PHOTO ADEL HANA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
A residential building destroyed by an Israeli strike at the Nousseirat refugee camp on December 23.
Israeli retaliatory bombings by land, sea and air in Gaza, where thousands of bombs were dropped, left 20,258 people dead, mostly women, adolescents and children, and more than 53,000 injured, according to the Ministry of Health. of Hamas.
Among them are 201 people killed in the last 24 hours in several places in the small Palestinian territory, overpopulated and besieged by Israel, said the same source.
Israeli aircraft and artillery targeted several targets from the north to the south of the territory, including the Nusseirat refugee camp (center) where a nighttime strike killed 18 people, he added.
“Executions” according to Hamas
In the town of Khan Younes, the large city in southern Gaza where clouds of smoke rise after a bombing, bodies and wounded were transported to Nasser Hospital.
PHOTO BASSAM MASOUD, REUTERS
People mourn next to the body of a Palestinian killed in Israeli strikes in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip, on December 23.
Men carry away a crying woman after seeing the bodies of her loved ones, a man crouching and crying, placing his hand on a black body bag. Outside, others pray in front of a body.
In addition to the aerial bombardments, the Israeli army launched a ground offensive on October 27 in the north of the territory which allowed it to advance towards the south and take several sectors. Israel lost a total of 139 soldiers in Gaza.
On Saturday, Hamas Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidreh accused Israeli forces of having this week “committed several atrocious massacres resulting in the deaths of dozens of people in the Jabaliya camp in the area of Tal Al-Zaatar and in the town of Jabaliya”.
“The occupying forces also executed dozens of citizens in the streets […] Dozens of martyrs have been recovered,” he added.
“The occupation executed a number of them in front of their families,” the Hamas government said in a statement.
Asked by AFP, the army did not specifically respond to the accusations of executions but assured that its strikes “against military targets comply with the provisions of international law”.
AFPTV images show a body under rubble in the streets of Jabaliya as well as massive destruction.
In Beit Lahia (North), civil defense said they had found “dozens of decomposing bodies”.
The army, for its part, released images showing its soldiers advancing through the ruins and opening fire on targets in the south of Gaza City. She said that “armed terrorists who attempted to attack the soldiers were eliminated” and several “buildings used as military sites by Hamas destroyed.”
PHOTO VIOLETA SANTOS MOURA, REUTERS
Israeli military vehicles, seen from southern Israel, maneuver in Gaza on December 23.
“Dead hostages”?
After five days of laborious negotiations, the UN Security Council adopted a text on Friday calling for the “immediate” and “large-scale” delivery of aid to Gaza, where the civilian population lives in terrible conditions.
The resolution, which refrains from calling for a “ceasefire”, rejected by Israel and its American ally, calls for “creating the conditions for a lasting cessation of hostilities”.
The real scope of this resolution is still uncertain: humanitarian aid, whose entry into Gaza is controlled by Israel, arrives in dribs and drabs from Egypt and from the Israeli border post of Kerem Shalom, but it is very far from meeting the immense needs of a population largely threatened by famine, according to the UN.
PHOTO MAHMUD HAMS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Palestinians wait for food at a refugee camp in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, on December 23.
UN boss Antonio Guterres on Friday blasted the “massive obstacles” to aid distribution created by the way Israel is carrying out its “offensive” in Gaza. Only a ceasefire can “begin to address the desperate needs of the population.”
In this context, the efforts of the Egyptian and Qatari mediators are continuing to try to reach a new truce which would allow greater aid to be sent, after that of a week at the end of November which also allowed the release of 105 hostages and 240 Palestinians detained by Israel.
But the belligerents remain intransigent.
Hamas demands a stop to the fighting before any negotiations on the hostages.
Israel is open to the idea of a truce but rules out any ceasefire before the “elimination” of the Islamist movement, classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel in particular.
Hamas military wing spokesman Abu Obeida said in a statement that his group had “lost contact” with its fighters charged with guarding five Israeli hostages, including three elderly men shown in a video released on December 18. .
“We believe that these hostages were killed during one of the Zionist strikes on the Gaza Strip,” he declared without further details.
PHOTO LEO CORREA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Smoke rises into the sky after an explosion in the Gaza Strip on December 23.
No confirmation of these statements could be obtained from the Israeli authorities.
“Hunger, famine, diseases”
In the Gaza Strip, where entire neighborhoods have been destroyed and 1.9 million of the approximately 2.4 million residents displaced by the violence, “the most pressing demand is an immediate ceasefire,” he said. says WHO Director General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
He recalled that “hunger, famine and the spread of diseases” largely threaten the 362 km territory.2where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are housed in makeshift camps.
“No place is safe, [il n’y a] nowhere to go,” reacted the director of UNRWA in Gaza, Thomas White, on X. “The people in Gaza are human beings and not pieces on a chessboard. »
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