The Israeli army on Saturday shelled Rafah, a town in the south of the Gaza Strip where more than a million Palestinians threatened by the war have taken refuge, while diplomatic negotiations are underway to reach a new truce.
Shortly after midnight, an AFP journalist heard powerful strikes in this town bordering Egypt. The Hamas Ministry of Health announced the deaths of at least 100 civilians overnight in the Gaza Strip, mostly women, teenagers and children.
The Israeli army, for its part, declared that it had killed “dozens of terrorists” in the north and center of the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours.
Since the start of the war on October 7 between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the violent fighting have fled to Rafah. They crowd into tents which invade the streets of the overcrowded city.
According to witnesses, 12 people were killed there during an airstrike on a house belonging to the Hijazi family. “They bombed without any warning,” said Bilal Jad, 45, a neighbor whose house was damaged in the attack. “There is no safe place. Airstrikes are happening everywhere,” he added.
“Escaped from death”
More than 1.3 million Gaza residents, according to the UN, out of a total of 2.4 million, are now refugees in Rafah, a city which had some 200,000 inhabitants before the war. The displaced people pile up near the closed border with Egypt, threatened in the middle of winter by famine and epidemics.
One of them, Abdoulkarim Misbah, said he first fled his home in the Jabalia refugee camp, in the north, to go to Khan Younès, in the south, before being displaced again: “ We escaped death last week in Khan Younes, without taking anything with us,” added this 32-year-old man.
Faced with this major humanitarian crisis and heavy civilian losses, diplomats are working to achieve a second truce, longer than that of a week which in November allowed the release of around a hundred Israeli hostages in Gaza and of Palestinians detained by Israel.
Hamas leader Ismaïl Haniyeh, based in Qatar, is expected in Egypt to discuss a proposal drawn up during a meeting at the end of January in Paris between CIA chief William Burns and Egyptian, Israeli and Qatari officials .
According to a Hamas source, the proposal concerns 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 still held in Gaza, and 200 to 300 trucks of Aid will be able to enter the small besieged 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 proposal, wanting a ceasefire. fire and not a new truce.
The proposed pause in the fighting was “approved by the Israeli side”, again according to Doha.
But Israel continues to affirm that it will only definitively end its offensive in Gaza once the Islamist movement is “eliminated”, the hostages released and after having received guarantees on the future security of its territory.
Blinken expected in the Middle East
The war was sparked by an unprecedented attack 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 at 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 27,238 people dead, the vast majority civilians, according to a latest report. report on Saturday from the Hamas Ministry of Health.
The truce project must also be at the heart of a new tour of the Middle East by the American Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, starting on Sunday, which will take him to Qatar, Egypt, Israel and the occupied West Bank. and in Saudi Arabia.
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.