FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
NIRIM (GAZA BORDER) – “I will not leave my sick people, this is contrary to what I have done all my life” (Mohamed Abu Selmia, 42 years old, doctor). “My neighbors started drinking sea water” (Mohammed Ibrahim, 28 years old, carpenter). “I give my children what I find, and today I found mortadella: I know it is pork, Allah forgive me” (Sami Abu Noura, 52 years old, shop owner). “I am not leaving my home in Gaza City, I would rather meet my fate and die with dignity” (Rami Swailem, 38 years old, mechanic).
The new Nakba is a flood of poor people with plastic bags in their hands. Anyone who drives, runs, stops exhausted. From north to south, along the coast. Looking for another place to survive, avoiding the already destroyed and partially invaded East. “It’s an epic march,” says his friend Safwat, 36% on the phone and only a few seconds for the caller: “No one is letting anyone down.” We don’t see the Israelis, but we hear them: they are evacuating us and bombing us further. They are sending us to Khan Younis, but where? It is also full of displaced people there. I will stop in Deira al Balah, I have four rooms on the beach, we are 50 relatives. But there is no refuge, no bunker, nothing. We watch the bombs fall. I believe that they will also attack from the sea, there are many ships. They destroyed the Jawal antennas, no one has a cell phone anymore. I use a Qatari manager as long as it works. My life plans are for the next five minutes.
Last call. “Hurry up and leave!” warns Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Woe to those who leave, commands the head of the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh. If dismantling Hamas is the ultimate goal, Gaza City is target number one. But there is little time left to search for hostages. And the risk that they will kidnap the first robbers. Not only is it a matter of numbers – 169,000 soldiers and 360,000 reservists, plus 105,000 available, versus 20,000 for Hamas and 6,000 for Jihad – it is also not enough for Sayeret Matkal’s special forces to enter or for people to absorb it Courage by shouting the motto “Who dares, wins!” Daring brings with it too many unknowns: How many civilians remain in the displaced north?
“We don’t know,” answers Juliette Touma from the UNRWA refugee agency. They have not been able to dismantle three hospitals, 95% of medicines have been used up, they only have a 48 hour generator, they are storing bodies in kitchen refrigerators and ice cream trucks, too many sick people cannot be transported to the south and 35,000 desperate people are taking refuge in pavilions Wanted: The IDF has set very tight deadlines to clear Gaza City and now it can no longer ignore them. The initial raids were to place sensors and eliminate vulnerable collaborators who had helped locate some hostages in prisons.
But the new phase, as Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu calls it, now targets the “Gaza Metro”: the network of tunnels dug from 2005 to the present at various levels with a depth of between 8 and 30 meters. It is likely that many prisoners are housed in anonymous goods depots, rural huts and apartments. But if Hamas has lowered some into the tunnels, this is an opportunity for Israel to close them: “Because in Gaza – explains Jonathan Conricus, IDF captain – there is no layer of protection for civilians who are left without bunkers to become martyrs to become.” in houses. And then there is a deep, highly protected layer reserved for the leaders of Hamas: from there, with air conditioning, food and the Internet, they control the operations and control the rockets remotely.” It’s not easy to get there: the network would be 500 km long, a hundred more than the London Underground, and is inspired by those already built by Syrian and Iraqi jihadists in Aleppo and Mosul. Of the three blocks – in Gaza City, in the center of the Strip and in the south of Khan Younis – it is now the first that matters: The Shin Bet secret service is betting that the enemy’s head will be cut off there. Among houses, mosques, schools and offices that had to be evacuated to avoid Hamas’s cowardly strategy of using civilians, they remained where they are supposed to act as human shields. “The enemy is time,” explains an officer: “It is very little to find the hostages alive.” And get international support while it lasts.” Old Shimon Peres taught us this: You Europeans are always indignant when we strike back, but you never remember why we did it.