SAO PAULO. A week after the biggest attack in 50 years of its turbulent history, Israel tightened its military siege on the Gaza Strip, which was administered by the Palestinian terror group Hamas, the perpetrator of the massacre of 1,300 people exactly a week ago.
According to a statement from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the country is preparing a land, sea and air operation aimed at reaching “the heart of Gaza.”
The humanitarian crisis caused by the siege imposed by Tel Aviv on the territory of 2.3 million inhabitants was brought to an end by the end of the ultimatum for 1.1 million of them to leave the part of the strip that covers the capital and the territory in the north, intensified.
The pressure has driven thousands to leave their homes, but fear of being targeted by Israel or Hamas scares the majority, reports said. According to the United Nations, around half of the strip’s total population has already been displaced since the outbreak of hostilities, up from 400,000 before the ultimatum. The small group of Brazilians who were in Gaza managed to move to Rafah, where they are awaiting an agreement to cross the border into Egypt.
The hospital in Gaza is unable to transfer patients
In the besieged capital, the situation is desperate: the city’s largest hospital, AlShifa, declared this Saturday that it was unable to relocate its care elsewhere, thereby attracting a crowd of refugees, who were looking for supposedly safer accommodation. According to management, 35,000 people live in the building.
According to director Mohammed Abu Selmia, AlShifa is receiving hundreds of injured people every hour and has already exhausted 95% of its supplies. “The situation at the hospital is literally miserable,” Israel told the Times. “The operating rooms don’t stop.”
Dead ends for Palestinians to leave Gaza
Hamas, which the day before had reneged on its call for residents to stay in Gaza and effectively turned them into human shields in the war, is blocking some exit points from the city, according to Israel. The group denies this, but there are geotagged videos showing the action.
Another problem is the stalemate between Israel, the Egyptian government and countries such as the United States and Brazil, which want to remove their citizens from the strip. The White House even announced that an agreement had been reached and Itamaraty received information that it could join an international convoy, but everything was reversed on Israeli orders.
Tel Aviv and Cairo have surrounded Gaza and controlled the movement of people and goods since 2007, when Hamas took power there. Now the Egyptians fear an exodus toward Sinai, a symbolic reversal of the biblical narrative that the peninsula was the springboard for the Israelites’ escape to Canaan (modernday Israel/Palestine).
Preparations for ground operations in Gaza
According to the IDF, the siege and ultimatum are aimed at preparing for the ground operation aimed at destroying Hamas. This Saturday (14), in the daily interview on the crisis, the IDF stated that the next phase of the war will include actions throughout the country, focusing on the land in Gaza.
So far, occasional raids have been carried out in which the IDF says it has located some of the 150 hostages captured by Hamas last Saturday, including at least 126 dead soldiers. The Palestinian group says they were victims of Israeli airstrikes.
“We are going into the heart of the city,” said the military spokesman. The designation of the Wadi Gaza River, a natural border to the south of the capital, as the border of the area to be cleared suggests a concentration of actions there but that may not be a military reality to count on the surprise factor.
Bombing in Gaza
In fact, this Saturday (14) there were bombings throughout the strip, for example in Khan Yunis (South), which became so dangerous that Itamaraty left them as an option for the Brazilians.
But it was Minister Gideon Saar (former Justice Minister, now without a specific portfolio) who gave the most objective indication yet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intentions in an interview with local channel 12. “The Gaza Strip must be smaller at the end of the war, there must be a designated security area where anyone who enters will be intercepted,” he said.
“Whoever starts a war with Israel must lose territory,” said the politician from the rightwing Likud party. In his view, the war against Hamas is directed against Iran, a regional rival that supports the Palestinian Islamic movement and other groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
Attacks in Lebanon
This Saturday there were again several border incidents between Lebanese militias and Israel, with an exchange of fire to mark positions, which has observers fearing a regional escalation of the conflict. A rocket of unknown origin, possibly from Hamas or Hezbollah, has injured two people in Nahariya, Israel’s northernmost city. (Igor Gielow/Folhapress)
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