Taking into account the Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip, Egypt wants to welcome the wounded from Palestinian territory from Wednesday. “Medical teams will be on site at the border crossing tomorrow,” a representative of health authorities in the Egyptian city of El Arish told AFP news agency on Tuesday. The border authority in the Gaza Strip, which is governed by radical Islamist Hamas, said Egypt had agreed to take in 81 seriously injured people.
According to the information, these will be transported from Palestinian territory to Egypt through the Rafah border crossing – the only border crossing in the Gaza Strip that is not controlled by Israel. An AFP photographer saw numerous ambulances waiting on the Egyptian side of the border on Tuesday.
According to the Egyptian official, a 1,300 square meter field hospital will be built about 15 kilometers from Rafah, in the city of Sheikh Suweid, in the north of the Sinai Peninsula, to treat the wounded from the Gaza Strip.
The US government expressed the hope that US citizens would also be able to leave the Gaza Strip. “We hope that any agreement to evacuate people will also create the possibility for U.S. citizens or their families and other foreign nationals to leave,” said U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller in Washington.
Meanwhile, Israel’s national security adviser, Tsachi Hanegbi, told journalists that his country was in discussions with Egypt over people injured in the Gaza Strip. But he emphasized that there are still differences of opinion about delivering aid to the Gaza Strip. Egypt wants to send more trucks with humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Israel, on the other hand, explains that it has limited capacity to inspect trucks.
A total of 59 trucks carrying urgently needed aid supplies arrived in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday. The convoy included four trucks provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Palestinian Red Crescent said late on Tuesday. The remainder was provided by the Egyptian Red Crescent, responsible for delivering aid from various Egyptian organizations and other countries.
According to this convoy, which transported food, water and medical supplies, just over 200 trucks have reached the isolated coastal area since the start of the war in Gaza. According to the UN, 100 trucks are needed every day to provide essential goods to 2.2 million people. Before the war began, an average of 500 trucks entered the Gaza Strip every weekday, according to the UN emergency relief office, OCHA.
The decision to admit injured people from the Gaza Strip came hours after an Israeli attack on the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip that killed at least 50 people and injured another 150, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health. .
Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the bombing “in the strongest possible terms” and warned of the “consequences of continuing these indiscriminate attacks that affect defenseless civilians.” The Israeli army spoke of an attack against Hamas “terrorists and terrorist infrastructures”, in which its main representative, Ibrahim Biari, and several other fighters were killed.
According to Palestinian reports, two people were killed in clashes with the Israeli military in the West Bank on Tuesday. The Health Ministry in Ramallah said a 70-year-old man was shot in the face during a military operation in the city of Tubas, north of Nablus. Six other people were injured in the operation, one of them seriously. A 16-year-old teenager was reportedly killed in clashes with soldiers in the town of Beit Ummar, north of Hebron. The army said it was reviewing the reports.
The already tense situation in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has worsened significantly since the start of the war between Israel and the Islamic Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, on October 7. Since then, Israel’s military says it has arrested more than 1,000 suspected terrorists in the country, including many members of Hamas. In the three weeks since the Islamic organization’s brutal terrorist attack on Israel, at least 123 Palestinians have died in clashes with the army and radical Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
According to Israeli sources, Hamas killed at least 1,400 people and kidnapped at least 240 people in the Gaza Strip in an unprecedented major attack against Israel on October 7. In response to the Hamas attack, Israel placed the Gaza Strip under constant fire. According to Hamas figures that cannot be independently verified, Israeli bombings have killed more than 8,500 Palestinians since October 7, including more than 3,500 children.