This Monday, the Israeli army took over a hospital and fenced off another as it advanced west of the city of Khan Younis. This was the largest land, sea and air bombing campaign in the southern Gaza Strip so far this year, sending dozens of families fleeing there. After days without any major changes in position, the troops have advanced into Al Mawasi, a town on the Mediterranean that had previously been designated as a safe area. Images from the area show clouds of smoke caused by the bombings, Israeli armored vehicles in new areas of Khan Younis (the second largest city in the Gaza Strip), and cars and entire families in caravans heading to the nearby Rafah region, where a million people are already crowded together.
In the Rafah region, where the border crossing with Egypt is located, the majority of displaced people – most of whom have fled from some point in the Gaza Strip more than once – are concentrated in Khan Younis and Deir Al Balah, a refugee camp, due to the intensification of attacks in the center, said the UN humanitarian aid agency in its latest report this Sunday. There are tents full of plastic waste and clothing, and people struggle to get at least one meal a day.
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The Hamas government's Health Ministry in Gaza asserts that troops have taken over a hospital in Khan Younis, Al Jair, and detained medical staff. There is only one accessible place in the city, Al Nasser, where you can see in the pictures how wounded people are treated on the ground due to lack of space. A journalist at the hospital, Ahmed Al Madhul, released a video showing men digging at the site to bury the dead, facing the risk of abandoning it, as happened in November at Al Shifa Hospital in the capital Gaza . “It is very difficult to leave the complex and go to a cemetery and bury them because we are surrounded and anyone who leaves the complex will be attacked,” one of the funeral participants, Abdelkarim Ahmad, told Portal. According to the authorities, 40 bodies were buried there.
Palestinian families are fleeing Khan Yunis, the second largest city in the Gaza Strip, this Monday due to Israeli military intervention. IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA (Portal)
Also in Khan Yunis is the Al-Amal Hospital. The Palestinian Red Crescent has commented on the city. The Palestinian Red Crescent estimates there are dozens more victims it cannot reach and reports it has lost contact with its teams. The death toll since the war began on October 7 as a result of the Hamas attack has reached 25,295 this Monday, 190 of them in the last 24 hours, according to the tally published on Monday by the Ministry of Health of the government of Hamas in Gaza. About 80% are minors and women.
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Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced this Sunday that “the operation in Khan Younis will be expanded and intensified to other locations.” “Clouds of smoke will cover the sky over Gaza until we achieve our objectives,” he said.
division
The advance of Israeli troops comes against a background of increasing internal division over its course. Although the vast majority of the country's Jewish population supports the war, questions are increasingly being raised about the direction of the campaign. In particular, on the part of the relatives of the 136 hostages remaining in the Gaza Strip, who, after days of information about a second exchange – after the one carried out in November – have intensified their protests, up to the incursion of violence this Monday and with banners at a meeting of the Parliament's Finance Committee in Jerusalem. “It can not go on like this! “You are sitting here while our children die!” one of them shouted as security tried to stop him. The group shouted phrases like “Shame on you!” at parliamentarians holding banners and photos of kidnapped people. or “How about paying a price for rescuing hostages?”
The forum representing the families issued a statement pointing out that “the anger and excitement” in Parliament “could have been avoided” and expressing its wish that “the elected representatives do not address any other issue than address the return of families.” Hostages whose time is running out.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with a group of relatives of kidnapped people on Monday and issued a statement indicating that there was an Israeli initiative for their release, which he could not “go into in detail,” but did not “An authentic Hamas proposal, contrary to what is being said.” He was referring to reports that Qatar and Egypt are pushing for a ceasefire that would see Israeli troops withdrawn from Gaza for a period of 90 days.
The news contradicts his words on Sunday in which he said that “Hamas is demanding the end of the war” in return for the release of the hostages. He rejected this, saying it would mean that the deaths of nearly 200 Israeli soldiers in Gaza during the invasion (the army just announced three more this Monday) “would have been in vain.”
Early elections
The incident also came amid increasing calls for early elections, with the first proposal since the war began to subject Netanyahu to a vote of no confidence. It was presented by Merav Mijaeli, leader of the Labor Party (who did not join the concentration government), who will step down from office in April. The reason: “the failure of the Israeli government to return the 136 hostages.”
Israeli soldiers fire a mortar on the Gaza border this Monday.AMIR COHEN (Portal)
The initiative received only 18 of the 120 votes and was boycotted by executive MPs, who called it a “wartime political spectacle.” Yesh Atid, the party of former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, did not support it, although it also remained in the opposition, considering it untimely, but reiterated this Monday its call for Netanyahu to sit down with him as leader of the opposition, to “set a date” for early elections. It is a demand that is increasingly present at protests.
Since the start of the war, all polls have suggested that Netanyahu has failed to renew his original governing coalition with ultra-Orthodox and ultra-nationalists that he formed in December 2022. The latest edition of Channel 12 points in the same direction: his party, the Likud, would lose half of the 32 seats, while National Unity, the formation of former Defense Minister Benny Gantz (now in the concentration executive), from 12 to 37 would rise, a growth at the expense of Lapid, who would fall from 24 to 14.
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