Heavy fighting broke out on Monday in the Khan Younes sector of southern Gaza, where the Israeli army is concentrating its operations against the Palestinian Hamas, despite calls for a pause in clashes that are growing internationally.
• Also read: Israel cannot build peace “through military means alone.”
• Also read: Hamas says the Israeli army is bombing Gaza, killing more than 25,000 Palestinians
Witnesses told AFP in the morning of heavy artillery fire, the advance of Israeli tanks and violent clashes near Al-Aqsa University and Nasser Hospital in Khan Younes.
The war, which entered its 108th day on Monday, was triggered by the attack of unprecedented scale and violence carried out by the Palestinian Islamist movement on Israeli soil on October 7, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,140 people, mostly civilians to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
About 250 people were kidnapped and taken to Gaza, including about a hundred who were released in late November in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. According to the same count, 132 hostages remain in the area, 28 of whom are believed to have died.
According to the Hamas Health Ministry, Israel has vowed to “destroy” Hamas, which came to power in the Gaza Strip in 2007. 25,105 people were killed in the military operations there, the vast majority of them women, children and young people.
Refugee with his family and a number of other displaced Gazans at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younes, where Hamas officials are hiding. Israel says Mahdi Antar expects an Israeli “attack.” “But leaving the hospital is dangerous because the artillery attacks continue,” Antar, 21, told AFP.
“Shells are falling next to the university,” describes Younis Abdel Razek, 52, who is staying in a tent in the building with 16 members of his family.
“Mistake”
Declared terrorist by Israel, the United States and the European Union, this movement, which presented its “version of the facts” in an unprecedented communications operation on October 7, acknowledged on Sunday “mistakes” that had led to the deaths of civilians, and called for “immediate action.” Ending Israeli aggression” in Gaza.
According to the Wall Street Journal, American intelligence estimates that Israel has killed “around 20 to 30%” of Hamas fighters so far, which is still far from its goal of destroying the movement.
According to this daily, the United States, Qatar and Egypt, which played a mediating role during the November ceasefire, are trying to persuade Israel and Hamas to agree on the release of the hostages in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Relatives of the hostages and supporters demonstrated overnight near the Israeli prime minister's official residence to demand such an agreement for their release, as challenges to Benjamin Netanyahu's government intensify in Israel.
On October 7, “this government and this prime minister have completely failed us (…) We call on the government to play its role, to propose an agreement, to enforce it and to bring back the remaining hostages alive,” he said. said one protester, John Polin, father of a hostage.
“Sole Survivor”
But Mr Netanyahu on Sunday “categorically” rejected Hamas's “conditions” and remained deaf to growing international calls for a humanitarian ceasefire and preparation for a post-war period, including the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Israel cannot build peace “through military means alone,” European diplomacy chief Josep Borrell stressed on Monday, before meeting separately in Brussels with heads of Israeli and Palestinian diplomacy, in an attempt by the 27 global approach” Bring peace to the region.
French military minister Sébastien Lecornu met his Israeli counterpart Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv this morning before meeting with Mr Netanyahu.
In the besieged Gaza Strip, where at least 1.7 of the 2.4 million residents have been forced to leave their homes, many of them in the south, the humanitarian and health situation is catastrophic, according to the United Nations.
Abdelrahmane Iyad, who was injured in Gaza and is now being treated aboard the French helicopter carrier Dixmude docked in Egypt, had no time to leave his home when it was hit.
“I was with my parents, my brother, my sister, my second sister and her husband and their daughter. They are all dead. I am the only survivor,” he told AFP.