“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. “A humanitarian ceasefire cannot wait any longer. » According to the Israeli army, the area “is home to the command and control of Hamas’ North Gaza Brigade.” The IDF, for its part, did not confirm the attacks, but said operations were underway in Jabaliya, the territory’s largest refugee camp, which had already been bombed several times in early November.
On the night of Friday to Saturday there was another bomb attack in Khan Younes, which killed at least 26 people, according to the director of Nasser Hospital in this southern Gaza town.
Still patients in Al-Chifa
Hundreds of people also evacuated Al-Chifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, which the United Nations said contained at least 2,300 trapped patients, doctors and displaced people, after receiving orders from the Israeli army, according to the facility’s director. The army denied ordering the evacuation and claimed it was “responding to a request” from the hospital director.
However, six doctors will remain at Al-Chifa Hospital to care for 120 patients and premature babies who cannot be transferred, said one of them, Dr. Ahmed el-Mokhallalati, on What the Palestinian Islamist movement denies.
In the occupied West Bank, five Palestinian fighters from Fatah, President Mahmoud Abbas’s movement, were killed in a rare airstrike on Nablus on Saturday, 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 houses 24,000 people, according to the U.N., which manages it.
Families of hostages in Jerusalem
In Israel, relatives of hostages held in Gaza since the unprecedented Oct. 7 Hamas attack that sparked the war arrived in Jerusalem after several days of walking to keep up pressure on the government. Several thousand people gathered outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to demand the release of the hostages. Israeli authorities estimate that around 240 people are being held by Hamas.
For its part, the United States stressed in Bahrain the need for an agreement on the release of these hostages held in the Gaza Strip in order to achieve a “significant” break in the fighting. The situation in the Palestinian territory is “terrible” and “unbearable,” recognized the American president’s first adviser on the Middle East, Brett McGurk. But “the influx of humanitarian aid, the influx of fuel (and) a lull in the fighting will occur when the hostages are released.”
A recent Hamas government report said 12,300 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli bombings of the Gaza Strip since the war began, including 5,000 children and 3,300 women. According to Israeli authorities, the Hamas attack on October 7 claimed 1,200 lives, mostly civilians.