2023-12-04 05:01:00
The Israeli Armed Forces confirmed this Sunday the start of the military ground offensive on the south of the Gaza Strip, while international calls intensify to protect the Palestinian civilian population and resume the ceasefire with Hamas. Until now, Israeli forces had penetrated the north of the enclave, although aircraft have been bombing targets throughout the territory since October 7. The Israeli military said it launched more than 400 attacks on Gaza since last Friday, when the truce ended, and Hamas said at least 700 people were killed in the last 24 hours alone.
Progress in southern Gaza
“We have intervened with force and thoroughness in the north of the Gaza Strip and now we are doing the same in the south while we continue to build on our successes in the north,” said the Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Armed Forces, Herzi Halevi. During an event with soldiers from the Gaza Division, Halevi said that “Hamas commanders will confront the Israeli Army everywhere.” At the other extreme, the Al Qassam Brigades, the military arm of Hamas, warned that 70 percent of the Israeli military contingent has already withdrawn from northern Gaza, although there is no confirmation from Israel.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, maintained that evacuation orders given by Israel to Gazans meant that “hundreds of thousands of people” were being “confined to increasingly smaller areas.” Osama Hamdan, a Hamas official based in Lebanon, charged that the Israeli plan to lure civilians from Gaza to the south was “a premeditated plan and a trap to commit more massacres against unarmed and displaced civilians.”
According to the UN, 1.7 million Gazans, more than two-thirds of the population, left their homes due to the war, unleashed on October 7 after the Hamas attack in southern Israel. The Islamist militiamen killed 1,200 people that day, mostly civilians, and kidnapped, along with other armed groups, some 240 people, including twenty Argentines.
At least seven people were killed in an Israeli bombing near Gaza’s border with Egypt, the Hamas government in the territory said. Hamas and the Islamist group Islamic Jihad announced “rocket barrages” against Israeli cities and towns, including Tel Aviv. According to Israel, two of its soldiers died in combat, the first since the end of the truce.
No respite on the horizon
The week-long truce allowed the release of 80 Israeli hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners who were in Israeli jails. But that truce ended Friday and the two sides blame each other for violating its terms. Israeli negotiators left Qatar on Saturday in the absence of agreements for a new pause in hostilities.
The Israeli military says there are still 137 hostages in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in Tel Aviv that the war will continue “until we achieve the objectives,” including the elimination of Hamas. Netanyahu added that to win he must continue the ground campaign in Gaza and that this would be done “observing international law.”
For his part, the number two in the Hamas political bureau, Saleh al Aruri, declared that “the price to pay for the release of Zionist prisoners will be the release of all our prisoners after a ceasefire.” Qatar, the small Gulf country that serves as the main mediator between Israel and Hamas, demanded an immediate international investigation into Israel’s crimes in the Palestinian enclave.
In response to the October 7 attack, Israel vowed to eliminate Hamas and unleashed an air and ground campaign that left 15,523 Palestinians dead and 41,316 wounded, according to Hamas authorities who control Gaza. International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Karim Khan said he will step up efforts to investigate allegations of war crimes by Israel and Hamas, following the end of his visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories. of the West Bank.
The United Kingdom announced its intention to send surveillance flights over Israel and Gaza to help locate the captives, some of whom have British nationality. “I cannot find enough words to express our concern about what we are seeing,” the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, wrote on the social network X.
Gazans are without food, water and other essential goods, and many homes are destroyed. UN agencies declared a humanitarian catastrophe, although some aid trucks entered the territory on Saturday. Fadel Naim, chief physician at Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, said the hospital’s morgue received 30 bodies on Saturday, including seven children.
On the other hand, Pope Francis urged both sides to implement a new ceasefire as soon as possible. “It pains us that the truce has been broken, that means death, destruction, misery,” the pope lamented in a text read in Italian by one of his assistants after the traditional Angelus prayer.
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