Israeli strikes and ground fighting continued on Saturday in the Gaza Strip, where the population hopes for a more massive arrival of humanitarian aid in the besieged Palestinian territory, after an appeal from the UN Security Council.
Bombing and artillery attacks targeted several targets from the north to the south of the territory, including the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, where an Israeli strike killed 18 people overnight, according to the Ministry of Defense. Health of Hamas.
Clouds of smoke rose above Khan Younes, the large city in southern Gaza, after a bombardment, according to AFP images. In this city, at Nasser Hospital, residents watched over their killed loved ones while bodies and wounded arrived at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir el-Balah, in the center of the territory.
The previous evening, the UN Security Council had adopted, after five days of laborious negotiations, a text calling for the “immediate” and “large-scale” delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, submitted since the 9 October by Israel to a total siege that plunged it into a disastrous humanitarian crisis.
On October 7, Israel declared war on Hamas, in power since 2007 in the Gaza Strip, in response to the bloody attack launched on its soil by the Palestinian Islamist movement.
The resolution adopted Friday refrains from calling for a “ceasefire”, rejected by Israel and its American ally. It 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.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday blasted the “massive obstacles” to aid distribution created by the way Israel is carrying out its “offensive”. Only a ceasefire can “begin to address the desperate needs of the people of Gaza,” he added.
Uncompromising belligerents
In this context, the efforts of Egyptian and Qatari mediators continue to try to reach a new truce, after that of a week at the end of November which allowed the release of 105 hostages and 240 Palestinians detained by Israel and the transport of more help.
But the belligerents remain intransigent: Hamas demands an end 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.
The October 7 attack left around 1,140 dead, mostly civilians, in Israel, according to an AFP count based on the latest official Israeli figures available.
Hamas commandos also kidnapped around 250 people, 129 of whom are still being held in Gaza, according to Israel.
Israeli military operations carried out in retaliation left 20,057 dead in Gaza, mainly women, adolescents and children, according to the Hamas government.
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, the army released images showing its soldiers advancing through the ruins and opening fire on targets in Issa, in the south of Gaza City, where automatic weapons fire echoed.
During its operations in this area, the army announced that “armed terrorists who attempted to attack the soldiers were eliminated.” “Several terrorist infrastructures were located, including buildings used as military sites by Hamas, which were destroyed,” the army added.
The Israeli army “continues its heavy artillery fire” on Gaza City and Jabaliya in the north, as well as Deir el-Balah, the Hamas Health Ministry said on Saturday.
Local media published videos showing decomposed bodies lying in the streets in the Tal al-Zaatar area of the Jabaliya refugee camp. AFP was unable to verify this information.
“No safe place”
“My message to the world is that they look at us, that they see us, that they see that we are dying. Why don’t they pay attention to it? “, protested to AFP Walaa Al-Medini, a displaced Palestinian-Egyptian who evacuated the Bureij refugee camp, seven kilometers north of Deir el-Balah.
The army on Friday ordered residents of Bureij and surrounding areas to “leave immediately for their own safety” towards an area presented as safe in Deir el-Balah.
But the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza said on Saturday that this evacuation order, which it said concerns “more than 150,000 people”, would move the population to areas where airstrikes are being carried out. in progress.
“No place is safe, [il n’y a] nowhere to go,” reacted the director of UNRWA in Gaza, Thomas White, on X. “People in Gaza are human beings. They are not pieces on a chessboard — many have already been moved several times,” he added.
The war has reduced much of Gaza to rubble, where around 1.9 million people, according to the UN, have fled their homes, or 85% of the population.
Only nine of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are still partially functioning, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), and international agencies are now warning urgently of the risk of famine threatening the population.
“The most pressing demand for the population of Gaza is an immediate ceasefire,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X, recalling that “hunger, famine and the spread of diseases” largely threaten the territory.
In the coming weeks, “10,000 children under the age of five will suffer from the deadliest form of malnutrition,” insisted UNICEF.
After repeated drone attacks in the Red Sea claimed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, allies of Hamas, a drone struck a commercial ship in the Indian Ocean on Saturday, two shipping agencies said, with one saying the ship was linked to Israel. This attack was not immediately claimed.