2023-10-13 19:13:00
Several thousand Palestinians fled Friday through the devastated streets of Gaza City, hoping to find refuge further south after an appeal to civilians by Israel, which is preparing for a ground offensive in retaliation for the bloody attack launched by the Hamas.
“This is only the beginning” of Israeli operations in Gaza, warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the seventh day of the war, triggered on October 7 by the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement against Israel and which has already thousands of deaths. Hamas also kidnapped 150 hostages whom it threatened to execute.
The Israeli army, which responded with intensive strikes on the Gaza Strip, also announced on Friday that it had carried out ground incursions there “in the last 24 hours”.
At least 1,300 Israelis, most of them civilians, have been killed since the attack, which has traumatized Israel where it has been compared to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Around 1,900 Palestinians, including many civilians, including 614 children, according to local authorities, died in the Gaza Strip, a small poor territory wedged between Israel, the Mediterranean and Egypt, under siege.
Hamas, classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel, which took power in 2007 in the Gaza Strip, announced Friday that 13 hostages, “including foreigners”, had been killed in Israeli strikes.
The Islamist group, which Israel has sworn to “annihilate”, had already announced the death of four hostages in the bombings. This situation makes any ground offensive even more complicated, a terrifying prospect of fighting in the heart of a city with an extremely dense population, with a basement dotted with underground passages.
A shield”
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, visiting Jerusalem on Friday, said Hamas was using the population as a “shield”.
Calls are growing around the world for a “humanitarian catastrophe” to be avoided, following Israel’s call to evacuate the northern part of the Gaza Strip, which affects around 1.1 million residents of the northern Gaza Strip. territory, out of a total of 2.4 million.
“Even wars have rules,” launched UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Friday before a Security Council meeting on the situation in Israel and Gaza, calling for “immediate” humanitarian access to the Gaza Strip.
He described a “health system on the brink of collapse,” “overflowing morgues” and “a water crisis.”
US President Joe Biden assured that “the humanitarian crisis” in Gaza was “a priority” for him, while several NGOs called for the opening of humanitarian corridors to help civilians.
Tension is also high on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where exchanges of fire are frequent between the army and pro-Iranian Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas.
A Reuters video journalist was killed and six other journalists from AFP, Reuters and Al-Jazeera were injured on Friday while covering the situation in southern Lebanon, the three media outlets said.
In the West Bank, another Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967, at least 16 Palestinians were killed in clashes with Israeli forces during rallies in solidarity with the Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Thousands of people also demonstrated on Friday in Beirut, Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Bahrain in support of the Palestinians.
At dawn on October 7, in the middle of Shabbat, the weekly Jewish rest, hundreds of Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel in vehicles, by air and sea, from the Gaza Strip.
In the streets, in the houses, they killed more than a thousand civilians, sowing terror under a deluge of rockets during this attack of a scale and violence unprecedented since the creation of Israel in 1948.
Around 270 people, according to authorities, were killed by Islamist fighters who burst into a music festival.
Yossi Landau, who has worked for 33 years for the NGO Zaka, specializing in the search for bodies, witnessed a horror scene in Beeri, a town where around a hundred people were killed. He saw a woman, her stomach “torn, where there was a baby, still connected by the cord, stabbed”.
Hamas kidnapped several dozen Israeli hostages, foreign and binational, of all ages. Israeli authorities have identified 150 hostages, while hundreds of people are missing and bodies are being identified.
After the attack, the Israeli army claimed to have recovered the bodies of 1,500 Palestinian fighters.
Israel responded by declaring war to destroy Hamas, shelling the Gaza Strip and deploying tens of thousands of troops around the territory, in the south of the country, and on the Lebanese border.
Flee, by all means
Friday morning, hundreds of rockets were again fired from Gaza towards Israeli territory, according to an AFP journalist.
The Israeli army called on all civilians in Gaza City to “evacuate their homes to the south, for their own safety.”
By the thousands, carrying their backpacks, they fled by all means, on foot, piled up on trailers, on carts, on motorbikes, in cars, through streets strewn with rubble, lined with ruined buildings, leaving the north of the territory to try to find refuge towards the south and the border with Egypt.
Here, a child holds his pillow tightly in his hand. There, a woman gathered everything she could save into a bag that she carried on her shoulder.
In Gaza City, leaflets in Arabic, dropped by Israeli drones, call on residents to leave their homes “immediately”. Hamas rejected this call.
The Gaza Strip, a territory of 362 square kilometers, has been subject to an Israeli land, air and sea blockade since Hamas took power there in 2007. Egypt controls its only opening to the world, the crossing point of Rafah, which is currently closed.
Subjected to a “complete siege” since October 9, the small territory is now deprived of water, electricity and food supplies, cut off by Israel.
“Death everywhere”
In Gaza, the sound of explosions is incessant. The Israeli army said it had targeted 750 “military targets” during the night while “massive strikes” hit the large Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza, according to AFP journalists.
“How long are we going to live under bombs with death everywhere?” says Oum Hossam, 29, his cheeks covered with tears, who is seeking refuge with his four children after the destruction of his house.
Other residents refuse to leave, for lack of means or not wanting to give in: “The enemy wants to terrorize us and force us into exile, but we will resist,” says Abou Azzam.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II warned against “any attempt to displace Palestinians”, stressing that the conflict “must not spread to neighboring countries”.
More than 423,000 Palestinians have already left their homes in the Gaza Strip to flee the bombings, according to the UN, which has launched an emergency appeal for donations.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas likened such a “displacement” to a “second Nakba” (“Catastrophe” in Arabic), the name given to the flight of some 760,000 Palestinians at the creation of the State of Israel.
13/10/2023 23:34:17 – Gaza (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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