“I will have the opportunity to travel to Ramallah (in the West Bank) at the end of the day,” Emmanuel Macron declared alongside the Israeli Prime Minister on Tuesday, October 24. According to franceinfo, he will meet Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority. At the end of the morning, the French President spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu before making a joint statement. In particular, he expressed “France’s condolences” to the Israeli people and assured that France had shared a “terrible ordeal” with its counterpart, while Hamas militants still hold hostages. “We are democracies against terrorists,” he added. Follow our live stream.
“The first goal is the release of the hostages.” Emmanuel Macron met his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog in Jerusalem on Tuesday morning. “We have to organize targeted operations against terrorists,” he explained. In the morning he remembered
A meeting with families of the victims. Upon his arrival, the President met around thirty French people in the lounges of Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, with 18 families of the victims represented. In particular, relatives of Mia Shem, the French-Israeli woman held hostage and featured in a video broadcast by Hamas on October 16, were present.
Two hostages released by Hamas. According to the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, which revealed their identities, these two women of Israeli nationality are from Kibbutz Nir Oz: Yocheved Lifschitz, 85 years old, and Nourit Kuper, 79 years old. Their husbands are still imprisoned. About 220 Israeli, foreign or binational hostages were identified by Israel and captured by men of the Palestinian Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip.
Humanitarian aid in small quantities. International aid has been arriving via Egypt since Saturday. On Monday, a third convoy crossed the border at Rafah, the only border crossing into Gaza that is not under Israeli control. A total of around fifty trucks were able to arrive in three days; according to the UN, at least 100 are needed per day.
The strikes are still ongoing. Since October 15, the Israeli army has been urging civilians in the north of the Gaza Strip, where the bombing is most intense, to flee to the south. However, the strikes continue to impact the south, near the Egyptian border, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people are crowding. The humanitarian situation is “catastrophic,” the United Nations warned. At least 1.4 million Palestinians have fled their homeland.