Hundreds of people evacuated the Al-Chifa hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip.
The war between Israel and Hamas entered its 43rd day on Saturday, November 18th. The evacuation of Al-Chifa hospital, the largest in Gaza, began as Hamas claimed attacks on the UN-run Jabaliya refugee camp had killed more than 80 people. Franceinfo takes stock of the most important information of the day.
The evacuation of Al-Chifa Hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip begins
According to the facility’s director and an AFP journalist at the scene, several hundred people, including many injured, were evacuated on foot from the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip on Saturday after receiving orders from the Israeli army. There were many sick people, doctors and displaced people here.
The Israeli army denied ordering the evacuation and claimed it was “responding to a request” from the hospital director. Israel claims that Hamas is using this facility as a military base, something the movement denies.
Hamas has reported a new number of human casualties since October 7th
According to the latest Hamas government report, 12,300 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli bombings of the Gaza Strip since the start of the war, including 5,000 children and 3,300 women. No source can support these numbers with certainty.
According to Israeli authorities, the Hamas attack on October 7 claimed 1,200 lives, mostly civilians. The Israeli military estimates that around 240 people were taken hostage. According to them, 51 soldiers have been killed in Palestinian territory since October 7th.
According to Hamas, more than 80 people are killed in two attacks on a refugee camp
Hamas’ health ministry announced on Saturday the deaths of more than 80 people in two separate Israeli attacks on the United Nations-run Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. The first attack killed 50 people at a school in the camp, the largest in the area. The second attack on a house killed 32 members of the same family, including 19 children. “We are receiving horrifying images of numerous deaths and injuries again in a UNRWA school that houses thousands of displaced people,” replied the head of the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini. According to the Israeli army, “the area is home to the command and control of Hamas’ North Gaza Brigade.”
In addition, the director of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younes, in the south of the Palestinian territory, announced that an airstrike on three residential buildings killed 26 people.
The hostage march arrives in Jerusalem
Thousands of relatives of hostages held in Gaza arrived in Jerusalem on foot on Saturday after several days of walking from Tel Aviv. The hostages’ families criticize the Israeli government for failing to provide them with information about efforts to release the hostages.
Families of Israeli hostages arrive in Jerusalem on November 18, 2023. (MOSTAFA ALKHAROUF / ANADOLU / AFP)
Five Fatah fighters are killed in an airstrike in the West Bank
Five Palestinian fighters from President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement were killed in a rare airstrike on Nablus in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian Red Crescent and Fatah sources said. The Israeli army said it had eliminated “a number of terrorists in Balata,” the refugee camp in Nablus that is home to 24,000 people, according to the U.N., which manages it.
New fuel deliveries to Gaza
After Israel gave the green light, a shipment of 17,000 liters of fuel arrived in the Gaza Strip on Friday, then 127,000 liters on Saturday, according to the Rafah border crossing authority between Egypt and the Palestinian territory. The UN called for urgent supplies of fuel to run generators in hospitals and to pump and purify water.
According to the United Nations, there is an “imminent risk” of famine in Gaza
The population of the Gaza Strip is “at imminent risk of famine,” warned the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). “We don’t ask for the moon. We demand essential measures necessary to meet the basic needs of the civilian population and contain the progression of this crisis,” protested the head of UN humanitarian operations Martin Griffiths in a video intervention in New York.
There is an “urgent need to improve the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip,” said Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a telephone interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
New pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Paris and several cities in France
In France, after an initial wave of bans by authorities, pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched for the third weekend in a row, sometimes braving torrential rain, as in Paris. According to the CGT, one of the largest French trade unions, which relayed the collective’s calls for demonstrations for a just and lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis, 100,000 people took to the streets in the country, including 60,000 in Paris, where several left-wing party representatives are were present at the procession.
In Paris, demonstrators called for a ceasefire in Gaza on November 18, 2023. (REMI BREMOND / HANS LUCAS / AFP)
The European Commission says it is against the “forced displacement” of Palestinians
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she was against the “forced displacement” of Palestinians after meeting Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo. According to the United Nations, 1.65 million Gazans have been displaced by the war.