2023-10-18 06:16:32
The bombing of a hospital in the city of Gazawhere several hundred people reportedly died just hours before his arrival Joe Biden in the Israel.
The meeting in Amman was cancelled
The American president will visit Tel Aviv, where he will have a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He was then scheduled to head to Amman, Jordan to meet with King Abdullah, Egyptian President Sisi and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. However, late last night, as President Biden headed from the White House to Andrews Air Force Base to board Air Force One, Jordan announced that the meeting was being cancelled. Earlier, Abbas had announced that he would not participate.
Subsequently, Biden has been informed that he will not go to Jordan after all. He promised to be in touch “in the coming days” with the Arab leaders he was due to meet in Amman.
In an official press release published by his services at the White House, Mr American leader says he is “outraged and deeply saddened” by the “explosion” at a hospital in Gaza and the “horrific loss of life” it caused.
In the text, which was released while on a flight to Israel, Mr. Biden assured that he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Jordanian monarch “immediately after hearing the news” and that he asked his associates responsible for the national security to “continue to gather information about exactly what happened.”
Earlier, Mr. Biden expressed his “condolences” to the families of the victims and wished “a speedy recovery to those injured,” according to his spokesman. The American president, however, refrained from commenting on who is responsible for yesterday’s attack on the hospital.
Following the tour of the US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, to Israel and six Arab countries, Biden would discuss with Netanyahu and the Arab leaders the issues of humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians, the safe exit from the war zone of hundreds of Americans and other foreign nationals and the fate of the hostages, and possibly scenarios for the next day in Gaza and the Palestinian territories as a whole. However, the bombing of the Al Ali hospital drastically changed the situation.
The Chronicles
The Ministry of Health of the Gaza Strip reported that the number of dead had exceeded 500 last night, while rescue teams, in the thick of darkness due to the interruption of the electricity supply by the Israeli army, were trying to find survivors in the ruins of the Al Ali hospital. which was built by a Baptist church.
Her management Hamas claimed that the bombing was carried out by an Israeli aircraft, a claim adopted by many governments of Arab and Muslim states.
However, the Israeli armed forces attributed the hospital bombing to a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian organization Islamic Jihad. “After data analysis, it was determined that an enemy rocket barrage heading toward Israel and passing over the hospital area was responsible for the hit to the nursing facility,” an army spokesman wrote on X/Twitter yesterday. In remarks late last night, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu claimed that “barbaric terrorists in Gaza,” not Israel’s military, were behind the centum at the hospital. “An Islamic Jihad rocket killed many Palestinians in a hospital, a place where lives should be saved,” said Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog.
The reactions of the Arab world to the bloody incident, with the Saudi Arabia and Emirate to speak of a “despicable Israeli crime”. The bombing of the hospital was condemned by King Abdullah of Jordan and Egyptian President Sisiwith the Jordanian monarch calling the event a “despicable massacre” and calling on Israel to immediately end its war of aggression.
On the floor of Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza, a mother holds her injured child in her arms. All around despair and pain after the attack on Al Ali Hospital in the city center that killed more than 500 people. AP Photo / Abed Khaled
In addition, Russia and the United Arab Emirates called for its emergency convening UN Security Council for this morning.
Anti-Israel protests erupted immediately after the hospital was bombed in front of the Israeli embassy in central Amman, Jordan, while protesters in the West Bank’s Ramallah also turned their anger against President Mahmoud Abbas. The leadership of Hamas spoke of a war crime, while its leader, Ismail Haniyeh, said that the responsibility for the deaths in the hospital was borne entirely by Israel and the US, underlining that Washington “offered Israel cover for its aggressive behavior. The massacre at the hospital proves the brutality of the enemy and the sense of defeat that has gripped him,” the Hamas leader said, calling on the citizens of the Arab world to rise up.
Hamas says the bombing was carried out by an Israeli aircraft, a claim adopted by the governments of Arab and Muslim states.
The Palestinian Authority declared three days of national mourning, while a general strike was announced for today in West Bank.
Earlier, the Israelis had bombed a school of the UN refugee agency (UNRWA), in the Al Baghazi refugee camp, in central Gaza, where 4,000 Palestinians, displaced from the northern part of the Strip by order of the Israeli army, had sought safe haven. Besides, the world food program of the international organization (WFP) warned yesterday that the food stocks will run out in a week at the most and the 2.3 million inhabitants will face a food crisis. At the same time, the lack of clean water and overcrowding in the facilities of the UN Refugee Agency favor the spread of epidemics, while medicines are scarce. Strong criticism is also being made of the methods used by the Israeli army in the campaign it launched to root out Hamas after the Islamic organization’s deadly attacks in southern Israel on October 7. Regarding the order to evacuate northern Gaza from its residents, the spokeswoman for the UN Human Rights Office, Ravina Samdasani, said: “We are concerned that this order, combined with the total siege of Gaza, may not be just a legal temporary movement, but a violent displacement of civilians, which violates international law.” She spoke of “horrendous reports, in which civilians trying to move to southern Gaza were beaten and killed”, stressing that the allegations needed immediate investigation. According to the Hamas-controlled Gaza interior ministry, at least 49 people were killed by Israeli shelling in the southern Gaza towns of Khan Younis and Rafah, where some 600,000 residents of the northern part have fled.
Invitations from Hezbollah
For one more day yesterday the exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israel, on the latter’s border with Lebanon, while Iranian sources told Al Jazeera that the Biden administration sent the Iranian ambassador to the UN a message of four conditions, demanding that Tehran exert its influence to restore calm in the region. At the same time, the Israeli army announced that it had killed four people who tried to detonate explosives on the border fence in order to infiltrate into Israel.
The leaders of the EU member states discussed the ongoing crisis in Gaza and the threat of regional conflagration. in yesterday’s extraordinary teleconference called by the president of the European Council, Charles Michel. The convocation was deemed necessary following the reactions caused by the attitude of the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, during her recent visit to Israel, where she made no mention of the risks of humanitarian disaster in Gaza and the need respect for international law. The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also visited Israel yesterday afternoon.
Hostage games
The willingness of Hamas to proceed with the release of all the hostages – Israelis and foreigners – it is holding in Gaza, as long as Israel stops its airstrikes against the Gaza Strip, was implied by a senior official of the organization in a conversation he had with the correspondent of the American NBC’s Richard Engel. The senior Hamas official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the hostages could be freed within an hour if Israel accepted the group’s terms, going on to argue that there was no safe place anywhere in Gaza where they could release of hostages. In exchange for the release of at least 200 hostages it captured on October 7, Hamas is also demanding the release of all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.
The Hamas official pointed out that the Washington and Tel Aviv governments are aware of the conditions the Islamic organization has set for the release of the hostages. Hamas is seeking the release of all Palestinian hostages, regardless of political affiliation, in an effort to boost its standing among the Palestinian population at the expense of its left-wing ideological opponents in Gaza and throughout Palestine.
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