Heavy ground fighting, no evacuation of the wounded via the Rafah terminal and ongoing negotiations for the release of hostages amid the Palestinian exodus…
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Israel has claimed to have destroyed 130 Hamas tunnels in the Gaza Strip since its ground operations began.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were surrounding Gaza City and conducting operations inside it.
The fighting on site is raging. 33 soldiers have died since the ground offensive began on October 27th.
According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, Israeli military operations killed 10,569 people, including many children; according to Hamas, more than 4,300 were killed.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the number of civilians killed in the Gaza Strip shows that there is “clearly something wrong” in Israel’s military operations against the Islamist terrorist organization Hamas.
He complained that Gaza had become a “graveyard for children.”
The pace of Palestinian civilians fleeing the northern Gaza Strip southward has accelerated as airstrikes intensify.
Crowds of Palestinians followed Israeli army orders and fled on foot into the southern Gaza Strip on Wednesday. They had a four-hour window to evacuate.
Thousands of people marched on Gaza’s main north-south highway, Salah al-Din, with only what they could carry…
Some of them held makeshift white flags.
IAccording to Srael, 50,000 Palestinians fled through the “evacuation corridor” on Wednesday.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), there were more than 15,000.
A source close to Hamas in Gaza told AFP that Qatar-led negotiations focused on the release of 12 of the 239 hostages still in Hamas’s hands, including six Americans, in exchange for a three-day humanitarian ceasefire Blockade by Israel since the bloody October 7 attack on its soil.
This ceasefire will also allow “more humanitarian aid” to be transported from Egypt through the Rafah terminal, according to the same source.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once again rejected any ceasefire, despite calls from the United Nations, NGOs and foreign capitals for an end to the fighting. “Without the release of our hostages there will be no ceasefire. Anything else is pointless,” he said.
In retaliation for the attack of unprecedented violence and scale since Israel’s founding in 1948, carried out by commandos of the Islamist movement in power in the Palestinian territory, Israel vowed to “destroy” Hamas.
According to Israeli authorities, at least 1,400 people have died in Israel since the war sparked by that attack began, with most civilian deaths occurring on October 7.
Thirteen NGOs, including Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and Amnesty International, called for an “immediate ceasefire” in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday on the eve of the international humanitarian conference organized by French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris.
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And we learned this evening that no injured Palestinians or dual nationals were evacuated from the Gaza Strip to Egypt via the Rafah border crossing on Wednesday. This is the second pause in evacuations since November 1, a Palestinian official said.
The crossing remained closed because Israel refused to approve the list of wounded people to be evacuated on Wednesday that had been sent to Egypt by Hamas authorities, an official from the crossing points administration said. Transition to the Hamas government.
The terminal had already been closed on November 3rd and 4th for the same reasons.
The Rafah terminal, which connects the Gaza Strip with Egypt, reopened on November 1 to allow the evacuation of foreigners and dual nationals stranded in the small Palestinian territory.
Additional sources • AFP, AP