Israel increased air raids on the besieged Gaza Strip on Friday, after warning that the war against Hamas, launched 70 days ago, would last a long time despite American pressure to reduce the intensity of strikes and protect civilians.
Early Friday, the Hamas Ministry of Health reported “dozens of deaths and injuries” in bombings in Khan Younes, the large city in the south of the Palestinian territory where Israel has expanded its ground operations.
The neighboring town of Rafah was also hit. “We were sleeping in our house and suddenly there was a strike, like a barrel bomb,” a barrel filled with explosives, survivor Bakr Abu Hajjaj told AFP.
“There are wounded, everything is destroyed, we have been suffering this war and this destruction for 70 days,” he added.
The war broke out on October 7 after the bloody attack carried out by Hamas on Israeli soil, which left around 1,200 dead, mostly civilians, according to the authorities. In retaliation, Israel promised to “destroy” the Islamist movement, in power in Gaza since 2007.
In the Gaza Strip, 18,787 people, 70% of them women, children and adolescents, were killed by Israeli bombardments, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health.
“Desperate”
The war has plunged the territory into a serious humanitarian crisis and 1.9 million inhabitants, or 85% of its population, have been displaced, according to the UN, many of them having to flee repeatedly as the fighting spread.
The UN warned Thursday of a “collapse of civil order” in the Gaza Strip, saying hunger and desperation were pushing residents to grab humanitarian aid, which is arriving in very limited quantities via Egypt.
“Everywhere we go, people are desperate, hungry and terrified,” said the Commissioner General of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini.
During the night, telecommunications remained cut once again in Gaza, according to the Palestinian operator Paltel, further isolating the small territory subjected by Israel to a total siege since October 9.
“There will be more difficult battles in the coming days,” warned Daniel Hagari, an army spokesman, saying soldiers were using “new combat methods,” such as planting explosive charges in locations frequented by Hamas fighters.
In total, according to the army, 117 soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the ground offensive began on October 27.
This offensive allowed Israel to take control of several sectors in the north, before extending throughout the territory, including in the south where hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced by the war have gathered.
Some 240 people were also kidnapped on the day of the attack, 132 of whom the military says remain in the hands of Hamas and affiliated groups after the release of 105 hostages during a seven-day truce that ended Dec. 1 .
The army announced Friday that it had recovered the bodies of three hostages in the Gaza Strip, including those of two 19-year-old soldiers, Nik Beizer and Ron Sherman, as well as that of a Franco-Israeli hostage, Elya Toledano.
“Only a few months left”
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan arrived in Israel on Thursday, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as Washington, Israel’s main ally , shows signs of impatience with the heavy civilian losses in Gaza.
Mr. Sullivan asked “tough questions” of Israeli officials and discussed the possibility of a shift in the offensive to “lower intensity operations” in the “near future,” the White House said.
“I want them (the Israelis) to focus on preserving the lives of civilians. Not (about) stopping against Hamas, but being more careful,” said US President Joe Biden.
But the Minister of Defense warned on Thursday that the war would last. Hamas “has established underground and aerial infrastructure that is not easy to destroy. It will take time — more than a few months — but we will defeat and we will destroy” Hamas, Mr. Gallant said.
In recent weeks, Israel has suggested that its post-war goal is not to administer the Gaza Strip, from which the Palestinian Authority was driven out in 2007 by Hamas, a classified terrorist organization. by the United States, the European Union and Israel.
It would not be “fair” for Israel to occupy Gaza in the long term, Jake Sullivan declared on Friday, before going to Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, for talks with leaders of the Palestinian Authority.
“Debris everywhere”
In the Gaza Strip, civilians are being pushed into ever-smaller areas, seeking to escape strikes and facing desperate humanitarian conditions.
In the far south, Rafah, a border town with Egypt, has become a gigantic camp, made of hundreds of tents cobbled together using pieces of wood, sheets and plastic tarpaulins, where the displaced take shelter. somehow in the rain, as winter and cold set in.
But here too, the strikes are daily.
On Friday, Palestinians searched through the rubble after another bombing.
“It is a refugee camp, with houses connected together. As you see, they are destroyed. As you see, there is debris everywhere […] it is an inhabited neighborhood which has nothing to do with combatant activities,” Abou Omar, a resident of the neighborhood, told AFP.
The UN continues to repeat that humanitarian aid, entry into the territory of which is subject to Israeli authorization, is insufficient and that overpopulation in the camps leads to disease, in addition to hunger and poverty. lack of care.
The war has also reignited tensions on the Israeli-Lebanese border and in the occupied West Bank, but also in the Red Sea, where Yemen’s Houthi rebels once again fired on a ship on Friday, according to an American official.
Among the diplomatic initiatives in progress, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Catherine Colonna, is expected on Saturday in Lebanon then on Sunday in Israel and the occupied West Bank.