The Israeli army bombs Rafah on Friday, a town in the south of the Gaza Strip where more than a million people are crowded together, raising fears of a humanitarian “disaster” for the United States, whose president, Joe Biden, criticized the Israel’s “excessive” response in the Palestinian territory.
Israel has been carrying out military operations in the besieged Gaza Strip since October 7, in response to an unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on its soil.
The head of American diplomacy, Antony Blinken, who concluded a regional tour on Thursday aimed at encouraging efforts to obtain a truce, urged Israel to “protect” civilians in its operations in Gaza, including Rafah.
After the Israeli army concentrated its military operations on the towns of Gaza (north) then Khan Younes, further south, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Wednesday to prepare an offensive on Rafah, a town located on the border, closed, with Egypt, where there are 1.3 million Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are people displaced by the clashes of recent months.
Washington warned Thursday of a “disaster” in Rafah and assured that it would not support an operation “without serious planning” regarding civilians there. “I think, as you know, that the response […] in the Gaza Strip, has been excessive,” declared US President Joe Biden, in a rare criticism of Israel, a close ally of the United States.
The Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, also said he was “alarmed” by such an operation which according to him “would exponentially worsen the current humanitarian nightmare whose regional consequences are already incalculable”.
” Nowhere to go “
AFP photographers saw several buildings destroyed in Rafah in Israeli strikes carried out overnight and Friday morning. In the same town, a group of people carried the bodies of three children, killed in a bombing.
“If they (Israel) carry out a (land) attack on Rafah, we will die in our homes. We have no choice, we have nowhere to go,” said Jaber al-Bardini, a 60-year-old resident of Rafah.
Despite the bombings, residents queued for water, which aid agencies said had become very scarce.
The war was sparked on October 7 when Hamas commandos infiltrated from the Gaza Strip, where the movement took power in 2007, carried out an attack in southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,160 people. , mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
Around 250 people were also kidnapped and taken to Gaza. According to Israel, 132 hostages are still held there, of whom 29 are believed to have died.
In retaliation, Israel, which considers Hamas a terrorist organization, like the United States and the European Union, vowed to “destroy” this group and launched an offensive that left at least 27,940 people dead in the territory. Palestinians, the vast majority of them women, children and adolescents, according to the latest report on Friday from the Hamas Ministry of Health.
The Israeli army reported on Friday fighting the day before across the Gaza Strip, saying that 15 “terrorists” had been killed in Khan Younes. She also reported in the same city the discovery of rocket launchers placed by Hamas “near a nursery and a mosque”.
UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini on Friday again called for a “humanitarian ceasefire.”
“Stolen Childhood”
“More than half a million girls and boys no longer go to school in Gaza […]. Their childhood is stolen from them,” he said on X.
In Cairo, a “new round of negotiations”, sponsored by Egypt and Qatar with the participation of Hamas, began Thursday to obtain “calm in the Gaza Strip” as well as an exchange of Palestinian prisoners and hostages, according to an Egyptian official.
An agreement at the end of November allowed a one-week pause in the fighting, the delivery of more aid to Gaza, the release of around a hundred hostages and some 240 Palestinian prisoners imprisoned by Israel. This time, the talks are about a truce lasting several weeks.
A source within Hamas told AFP that there had been “positive” discussions in Cairo where talks are continuing.
A sign of high tensions in the Middle East in the wake of the war in Gaza, salvos of rockets were launched overnight from Lebanon towards northern Israel, shortly after an Israeli airstrike against a military leader of the Islamist movement Lebanese Hezbollah, which supports Hamas.