Israel stepped up airstrikes on the besieged Gaza Strip on Friday after warning that the war against Hamas would be long despite American pressure to reduce the intensity of attacks and protect civilians.
• Also read: Israel announces it has recovered the remains of two soldiers in Gaza
• Also read: Israel warns Gaza war will last “more than a few months.”
During his visit to Israel, American envoy Jake Sullivan argued for control of Gaza following the end of the war triggered 70 days ago by the bloody attack on Israeli soil by Hamas, which is in power in the Palestinian territory. should be returned to the Palestinians.
Clouds of smoke rose Friday in northern Gaza and in Khan Younes, the large southern city where the Hamas health ministry reported “dozens of dead and injured” in bombings.
The neighboring city of Rafah was also hit. “We were sleeping in our house and suddenly there was an impact, like a barrel bomb,” a barrel filled with explosives, survivor Bakr Abu Hajjaj told AFP.
“There are wounded, everything is destroyed, we have been suffering from this war and this destruction for 70 days,” he added.
According to the authorities, around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the attack on October 7, which was unprecedented in Israel's history. In retaliation, Israel promised to “destroy” Hamas.
According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, 18,787 people, 70% of them women, children and teenagers, were killed by Israeli bombings in the Gaza Strip.
“Desperate”
The war plunged the territory into a severe humanitarian crisis and displaced 1.9 million residents, or 85% of the population, according to the United Nations, many of whom were forced to flee multiple times as fighting spread.
The United Nations warned on Thursday of a “collapse of civil order” in the Gaza Strip, saying hunger and desperation would push residents to turn to humanitarian aid, which is arriving in very limited quantities via Egypt.
“Everywhere we go, people are desperate, hungry and scared,” said the Commissioner General of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini.
Telecommunications remained disrupted again on Friday, further isolating the small area that has been under a total siege by Israel since October 9.
“There will be more difficult fighting in the coming days,” warned Daniel Hagari, an army spokesman.
According to the army, a total of 119 soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the ground offensive began on October 27th.
This offensive allowed Israel to take control of several sectors in the north before pushing south, where hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced by the war gathered.
About 250 people were kidnapped on the day of the attack, 132 of whom remained in the hands of Hamas and affiliated groups, according to the military, after 105 hostages were released during a seven-day ceasefire that ended Dec. 1.
The Army announced Friday that it had recovered the bodies of three hostages, including those of two 19-year-old soldiers, Nik Beizer and Ron Sherman, and that of a French-Israeli hostage, Elya Toledano.
“Just a few more months”
Israel's main ally, the United States, is showing signs of impatience with heavy civilian casualties in Gaza. President Joe Biden said Tuesday that Israel is at risk of losing international support because of its “indiscriminate” bombings.
According to the White House, Washington wants the Israeli offensive to transition to “lower-intensity operations” in the “near future.”
But at the end of the war, it was “not right” for Israel to occupy Gaza long-term, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Friday in Tel Aviv before leaving for Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
The Israeli government, Mr. Sullivan stressed, has itself “made it clear that it has no intention of occupying Gaza in the long term and that control of Gaza, the administration of Gaza and the security of Gaza should be left to the Palestinians. “.
Any attempt to “separate” and “isolate” the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian state is “unacceptable,” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told the American envoy.
Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, from which the Palestinian Authority was expelled in 2007 by Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned Thursday that the war would continue. Hamas “has built an underground and air infrastructure that is not easily destroyed.” It will take time – more than a few months – but we will defeat and destroy Hamas, he said.
“Rubbish everywhere”
In the Gaza Strip, civilians are being forced into ever smaller areas to avoid attacks under desperate humanitarian conditions.
In the far south, Rafah, a border town with Egypt, has become a vast camp made up of hundreds of tents cobbled together from pieces of wood, sheets and plastic sheets in which the displaced people seek refuge. Somehow in the rain, like in winter and the cold set in.
But here too there are strikes every day.
“It is a refugee camp with houses connected to each other. As you can see, they are destroyed. As you can see, there is rubble everywhere (…), it is an inhabited neighborhood that has nothing to do with fighting,” Abou Omar, a local resident who searched through the rubble, told AFP on Friday.
In the north, Israeli soldiers supported by tanks launched an attack on Kamal Adwane hospital in Beit Lahiya for the third day in a row on Thursday, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) said. In the same region, Al-Awda is in Jabalia still surrounded by the army.
The United Nations continues to emphasize that humanitarian aid, which requires Israeli authorization to enter the territory, is inadequate and that overpopulation in the camps leads to disease in addition to hunger and poverty. Lack of supply.
The war has reignited tensions on the Israel-Lebanese border and in the occupied West Bank, but also in the Red Sea, where Yemen's Houthi rebels, allies of Hamas, carried out two attacks on ships bound for Israel on Friday.
The Houthis “pose a concrete threat to freedom of navigation” in the Red Sea, Sullivan said.