More than 200 Palestinians have been killed in relentless Israeli bombings and ground operations in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, Hamas said, after a UN resolution on humanitarian aid failed to find a solution. Call for a ceasefire.
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Almost three months after the start of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, it announced the discovery of the bodies of dozens of killed Palestinians, some of whom it said were “executed” during an Israeli ground operation in Jabaliya, north of the Gaza Strip.
It was an attack of unprecedented scale and violence by Hamas commandos who had crossed into southern Israel from the neighboring Gaza Strip and sparked the latest war between the Palestinian group and the Israeli army.
AFP
The attack claimed around 1,140 lives, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on the latest official Israeli figures. Israel said Palestinian fighters also kidnapped about 250 people, 129 of whom are still being held in Gaza.
Israel's retaliatory land, sea and air attacks in the Gaza Strip, in which thousands of bombs were dropped, killed 20,258 people, mostly women, teenagers and children, and injured more than 53,000, according to Hamas' health ministry.
That includes 201 people killed in the last 24 hours in several locations in the small Palestinian territory overpopulated and besieged by Israel, the same source said.
Israeli aircraft and artillery targeted several targets from the north to the south of the territory, including the Nusseirat refugee camp (center), where 18 people were killed in a nighttime attack, he added.
“Executions” according to Hamas
In the city of Khan Younes, the large city in the south of the Gaza Strip, where clouds of smoke rise after a bomb attack, bodies and wounded people are transported to Nasser Hospital.
Men take a crying woman after seeing the bodies of their loved ones. A crouching, crying man places his hand on a black body bag. Outside, others pray in front of a corpse.
In addition to the airstrikes, the Israeli army launched a ground offensive in the north of the territory on October 27, allowing it to advance south and capture several sectors. Israel lost a total of 139 soldiers in the Gaza Strip.
AFP
On Saturday, Hamas Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidreh accused Israeli forces of carrying out “several cruel massacres this week that resulted in the deaths of dozens of people in the Jabaliya camp in the Tal Al-Zaatar area and in the city of Jabaliya have led”.
“The occupation forces also executed dozens of citizens on the streets […] Dozens of martyrs have been recovered,” he added.
“Many of them were executed by the occupation in front of their families,” the Hamas government said in a statement.
When contacted by AFP, the army did not respond specifically to the allegations of execution, but assured that its attacks “against military targets were in accordance with the provisions of international law.”
AFPTV images show a body among rubble in the streets of Jabaliya and massive destruction.
In Beit Lahia (north), civil defense said it found “dozens of decomposing corpses.”
AFP
The army, for its part, released images showing its soldiers advancing through the ruins and opening fire on targets in the south of Gaza City. It claimed that “armed terrorists who tried to attack the soldiers were eliminated” and that several “buildings were used by Hamas as military sites.” [ont été] destroyed”.
“Dead hostages”?
After five days of arduous negotiations, the UN Security Council on Friday adopted a text calling for the “immediate” and “large-scale” delivery of aid to Gaza, where the population lives in terrible conditions.
The resolution, rejected by Israel and its American ally, which refrains from calling for a “ceasefire,” calls for “creating the conditions for a permanent cessation of hostilities.”
The actual scope of this resolution is still uncertain: Humanitarian aid, whose entry into the Gaza Strip is controlled by Israel, is coming in droves from Egypt and the Israeli border post Kerem Shalom, but it is far from meeting the immense needs of a population that is following According to the United Nations, the population is largely at risk of famine.
UN chief Antonio Guterres on Friday criticized the “massive obstacles” to the distribution of aid caused by the way Israel is conducting its “offensive” in Gaza. Only a ceasefire could “initially address the desperate needs of the population.”
In this context, Egyptian and Qatari mediators continue to try to reach a new ceasefire that would allow the delivery of major aid, after 105 hostages and 240 detained Palestinians were also released by Israel in a week in late November.
But the belligerents remain adamant.
Hamas is calling for an end to the fighting before negotiations over the hostages take place.
Israel is open to the idea of a ceasefire, but rules out any ceasefire before the “elimination” of the Islamist movement, which is classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and especially Israel.
Hamas's military wing spokesman Abu Obeida said in a statement that his group had “lost contact” with its fighters tasked with guarding five Israeli hostages, including three elderly men, who were held hostage in a prison on April 18 The video published in December can be seen.
“We believe that these hostages were killed in one of the Zionist attacks in the Gaza Strip,” he said, without providing further details.
Confirmation of these statements could not be obtained from the Israeli authorities.
“Hunger, famine, disease”
In the Gaza Strip, where entire neighborhoods have been destroyed and 1.9 million of the roughly 2.4 million residents have been displaced by the violence, “the most urgent demand is an immediate ceasefire,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
He recalled that “hunger, famine and the spread of disease” largely threaten the 362 km2 area where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are housed in makeshift camps.
“No place is safe [il n’y a] nowhere,” UNRWA Gaza director Thomas White responded to X. “The people of Gaza are people, not pieces on a chessboard.”
A drone struck a commercial ship in the Indian Ocean on Saturday, following repeated drone strikes in the Red Sea claimed by Yemen's Houthi rebels in solidarity with the Palestinians, two shipping agencies said, one of which said the ship was bound to Israel. The attack was not alleged.