2023-11-06 00:58:35
by Davide Frattini
Blinken sees Abu Mazen. The IDF: «The encirclement of Gaza City is complete». Israeli sources: «We will stay inside, we need to denazify»
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
JERUSALEM — It is in this pink villa on the roundabout with Viale Gerusalemme that he receives the news that he has been elected president. Eighteen years have passed and Abu Mazen has never returned to Gaza, he could have until 2007, until Hamas’ rivals took it from him with weapons. Since then the Raìs has governed over half of that future state that he had helped to design with the Oslo agreements. He survived Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres: an avid smoker with heart problems, at 87 he holds more than that agreement that the extremists on both sides wanted to tear to pieces.
On the thirtieth day of the war, Antony Blinken met him on an unscheduled visit to the Muqata palace to promise him: “The Strip is an inseparable part of the Palestinian nation.” And to obtain in exchange what for Joe Biden, the American president, and his secretary of state must be the diplomatic result of the Israeli campaign: the Authority agrees to regain “full responsibility” over Gaza – agrees Abu Mazen – “in a comprehensive solution for the West Bank and East Jerusalem. First we must stop this genocidal war.” The goal is to return to the negotiations frozen in 2014. Blinken flew from Ramallah to Baghdad.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds himself in the ultra-messianic coalition such as Amichai Eliyahu who proclaims: «The atomic bomb on Gaza? One chance”. The head of the government suspends him from sessions without kicking him out, defines the words as “out of touch with reality”, and furthermore breaks down seventy years of ambiguity adopted by the Israelis regarding the possession of nuclear weapons. He seems to refuse to oust other extremists from Eliyahu’s party from the coalition because his strategy is at odds with the American one and with the plans illustrated by moderate politicians such as Yair Lapid. A “high-profile source” explains to Israeli newspapers: “Control of security in the Strip will remain ours for a long time. A process of denazification is necessary. We cannot trust the Palestinian Authority where the same ideology is present.” Revelations that come anonymously from Netanyahu himself or from one of his advisors authorized to speak.
Bibi, as he is nicknamed, once again rejects any possibility of a ceasefire that does not include the return of the hostages, there are over 240 of them, including foreign citizens. He brands Yahia Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, as “a little Hitler hiding in a bunker, he doesn’t care about the people.” It is around that bunker that the siege of Israeli troops is tightening: “The encirclement of Gaza City is complete, at this point the territory is divided between north and south”, comments Daniel Hagari, spokesman for the armed forces. After sunset the bombings on these neighborhoods are even more devastating. The fundamentalists declare that the attacks are concentrating around the hospitals: in the afternoon the army spokesmen had shown new classified materials to illustrate the network of tunnels dug by the paramilitaries under the clinics. It could be a sign that the battle for Al Shifa, the largest in the Strip, is approaching. Under the building – the intelligence is convinced – the Hamas command is concentrated. «The order has not been given – explains a military source to the Time newspaper – but the raid is expected, if the opportunity presents itself». The jihadists are still able to launch rockets as far as Tel Aviv.
“We dug with our bare hands all night,” Said told the Reuters agency. “We extracted corpses in pieces, remains of children.” He had been awakened by the explosion of missiles fired at the Maghazi refugee camp, killing 45 people. In total, almost 10 thousand Palestinians were killed, mostly civilians. The humanitarian situation is catastrophic for the over 2 million inhabitants, half of whom have been displaced from the areas where Israeli troops entered and have taken refuge in the south.
Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas abroad, met with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and flew from Iran to Beirut where he should evaluate together with Hezbollah’s allies a possible exchange of prisoners with Israel. Right on the northern front – after weeks of clashes – an Israeli civilian was killed, while a missile dropped by a drone hit the car of a Lebanese journalist, killing his three daughters and their mother. Shiite militiamen responded by targeting cities on the other side of the border. The civilian deaths are one of the red lines indicated by Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, in his speech on Friday. «Italy must worry about its soldiers», Hossein Amir Abdollahian, Iranian Foreign Minister, tells Tg1, referring to the soldiers in the Unifil force. “The area is increasingly unstable.”
November 5, 2023 (modified November 5, 2023 | 10:54 pm)
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