The United States, Israel’s main ally and arms supplier in the current conflict, continues to express dissatisfaction with the development of the war in Gaza, which enters its third month next Thursday. Disagreements with Israeli authorities are becoming clearer as opposing parties ended a week-long ceasefire on Friday and resumed attacks on the Gaza Strip, while at the same time rockets were fired at Israel from that territory. In the last 24 hours alone, the death toll in the Palestinian enclave has risen to over 700, a spokesman for the local government in the hands of Hamas said in statements to the Al Jazeera network on Sunday morning.
But the pressure the United States is putting on that country’s troops to minimize civilian casualties and release humanitarian aid is not reflected in the way the army has resumed its bombing campaign after this period of calm. These are taking place not only in the southern cities of Khan Younis and Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Israel from other areas have settled, but also in the north, as happened this Sunday in a residential area of the Yabalia refugee camp.
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High-ranking US officials such as Vice President Kamala Harris, who warned that “too many innocent civilians have been murdered,” or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, for whom defending the lives of Palestinian civilians is a “moral responsibility and a mission.” “strategic” have raised the tone regarding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans.
The administration led by President Joe Biden has reminded the Israeli president that given his disruptive idea, the only way out of the race is the Palestinian Authority (PNA). According to the White House, this body must regulate the joint plans of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a single administrative unit leading to the realization of a separate state on the path of self-determination. During an intervention in California, Austin warned that “urban war can only be won by protecting civilians” and also called on Israel to allow humanitarian access, which was slowed after the end of the ceasefire.
These differences between allies come to the fore following warnings issued by Secretary of State Antony Blinken during his visit to Israel on Friday, hours before the ceasefire was dissolved. “The level of civilian suffering and the images and videos from Gaza are devastating,” warned Kamala Harris from Dubai, where she was attending the climate summit. The death toll in Gaza from Israeli attacks has reached nearly 16,000, two-thirds of them minors and women, since the war began on October 7 with the massacre of 1,200 people by Hamas on Israeli territory, from where 240 hostages were also taken . Only 105 were released as part of a ceasefire exchange for Palestinian prisoners. The United States does not question Israel’s right to defend itself, put an end to the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and return all those abducted, but at the same time, as Harris said, denounces the excessive number of victims that have nothing to do with the armed Islamist movement do have.
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“More must be done to protect innocent civilians”
In this sense, the vice president added, Israel has the right to attack “military targets” to put an end to Hamas, but it cannot override international humanitarian law that governs armed conflict, Harris stressed, so “It must do more.” Protect innocent civilians.” The vice president said that after the current competition, three pillars must be the pillars of the new regional reality. On the one hand, the reconstruction, which focused on houses, hospitals, electrical installations or water supplies, all of which were severely damaged during the Israeli military operation. Secondly, security, in which ANP agents must be involved, with possible international support, but never with “the terrorists” of Hamas. And thirdly, the government, which must be led by a revitalized ANP that is allowed to regulate the design of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a single administrative unit.
Kamala Harris admitted that she is in contact with the Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, to reach a new ceasefire, but at the moment there is no sign that the main mediating countries (Qatar, Egypt and the United States ) do this will achieve it. . Netanyahu withdrew his team from Qatar on Saturday due to an apparent lack of results.
“Breaking off negotiations is a classic negotiating tactic,” says Hershon Baskin, who took part in previous negotiations with Hamas on the Israeli side. “Negotiations will continue. (…) Hamas demands a higher price. “Israel must make difficult decisions,” he emphasizes in his X account. Israel would seek to add new categories of hostages to the list of those yet to be released, such as elderly men or female soldiers, sources cited Haaretz newspaper. The Islamist movement, for its part, is pushing to increase the number of prisoner releases in Israeli prisons and buy time with a new ceasefire, one of its political leaders, Saleh Al Aruri of Lebanon, said in an interview with Al Jazeera.
Aerial photos taken by the Israeli army this Sunday from Kibbutz Beeri, about three kilometers from the Gaza Strip.ATEF SAFADI (EFE)
Without referring to the hundreds of civilian casualties reported by Gaza authorities, the Israeli military said it had eliminated five Hamas “terrorists” through a drone strike and that its planes and helicopters did so from the air and its ships from the sea would continue to do so hit its infrastructure of tunnels and weapons depots. In total, they have discovered 800 tunnels and destroyed 500 since the start of the war.
The force’s Arabic spokesman, Avichay Adraee, posted on the social network “If they don’t want to suffer the same fate.” He previously warned residents of six areas in the south to stay away because of the risk of becoming victims of bombings. As on previous occasions, the army disguises its threats with euphemisms such as “We invite you to move to the well-known shelters for internally displaced people,” Adraee’s post reads.
As already happened in the north, the new Israeli offensive after the ceasefire increases the pressure on hospitals in the south of the Palestinian Mediterranean enclave, where “the conditions are more than inadequate, unimaginable for the provision of medical care,” said the director this Sunday of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on his account on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
At Nassar Hospital (Khan Yunis) alone, the 1,000 patients the facilities house are three times the capacity they were designed to accommodate, according to this UN agency’s team that traveled there on Saturday. They are joined by all citizens, many of them displaced from other places in the Gaza Strip, who seek refuge and occupy “every corner,” while around them “patients on the ground are being treated amid cries of pain.”
In this hospital, “there are children everywhere with third-degree burns, shrapnel wounds, brain injuries and broken bones,” describes Unicef spokesman James Elder, who also speaks to Al Jazeera of “mothers crying for children who appear to be…” hours from death be removed.” In his profile on the social network Instagram, in which one of these burned minors appears, he assures that “the war against children is today more intense than ever.” This boy is Mohamed, nine years old, who before the war was the best student in his class, as shown in one of the pictures that he published with his diploma, next to the picture that shows him in a bed in Nassar. Hospital shows. “His entire family was murdered,” Elder added.
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