2023-12-04 00:51:00
The human toll continues to rise in the besieged Gaza Strip, where Israel carried out new bombings on Sunday, December 3. Engaged in a ground offensive since October 27 in the north of Gaza, where it took control of several sectors, the Israeli army has increased, since the resumption of fighting on December 1, air raids in the south, where Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians sought refuge.
The Hamas health ministry said Sunday that 15,523 people, 70 percent of them women and children, have been killed since the war began on October 7 in Israeli bombardments of the Gaza Strip in response. to the bloody attack of the Palestinian terrorist movement against Israel.
In Israel, the attack launched by Hamas commandos left 1,200 dead, mostly civilians, according to the authorities. In response, Israel declared war on Hamas and promised to destroy the Islamist movement, in power since 2007 in Gaza. In the far north of Gaza, along the border with Israel, the Israeli army carried out airstrikes on Sunday followed by artillery fire, which raised thick plumes of smoke and dust.
“The worst bombing”
In the south, since Friday, strikes have massively targeted the large city of Khan Younes and its surroundings, where every day now the Israeli army warns in leaflets dropped on certain neighborhoods that a “terrible attack is imminent”, and orders the residents to leave. On Sunday, residents were fleeing the city, on foot, piled into carts or by car, their belongings piled on the roof, according to AFP images.
In the hospitals of the south of the Gaza Strip overwhelmed by the influx of wounded, where the fuel reserves to run the generators are almost dry, there is chaos. At the Nasser hospital in Khan Younès, the largest in the south of the territory, new wounded and new bodies, sometimes with no one to identify them, flock to each explosion.
“Words fail me to describe the horrors that are hitting the children here,” James Elder, a Unicef spokesperson present at Nasser hospital, said in a video on Sunday. “It is the worst bombing of the entire war that is now hitting southern Gaza. I see children arriving en masse among the victims,” he declared earlier on X.
“500 tunnels” destroyed
A truce, negotiated by Qatar with the support of the United States and Egypt, lasted seven days between November 24 and December 1. This pause in fighting allowed the release of dozens of hostages kidnapped in Israel on October 7, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons, as well as the entry from Egypt of hundreds of humanitarian aid trucks into the small devastated territory.
The Israeli army said on Sunday that it had carried out “around 10,000 airstrikes since the start of the war”. It also announced that it had destroyed since the start of its ground offensive around 500 tunnel entrances used by Hamas, out of a total of around 800 that had been discovered. These tunnel entrances were “located in civilian areas, many inside civilian buildings, such as schools, kindergartens, mosques or playgrounds,” the army said.
Israel accuses Hamas, classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel, of having installed its infrastructure in an immense network of tunnels dug in the basement of Gaza, particularly in inhabited areas, and to use civilians as human shields. On Sunday, the army reported 17 salvos of rockets fired from Gaza, most of which were intercepted by Israel’s air defense system. Israeli authorities also announced the death of two soldiers during the ground offensive, bringing to 398 the number of soldiers killed since October 7, including 72 dead in the fighting in Gaza.
” The price to pay “
Visiting reservists, Israeli Chief of Staff General Herzi Halevi said the army was continuing its operations in the southern Gaza Strip “with as much force and as much results” as it had done so in the north, in a video released on Sunday by the army. Opposite, the number two of the Hamas political bureau, Saleh al-Arouri, declared ALSO READ Hamas-Israel War: “The success of mediation is based on real risk-taking”: “The price to pay for the release of Zionist prisoners will be the release of all of our prisoners, after a ceasefire.”
The army estimated that around 240 people were kidnapped in Israel on the day of the attack and taken to Gaza. According to the army, 137 hostages are still in the hands of Hamas or affiliated groups, after the release during the truce of 80 of them in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners, while 25 other hostages were released on the sidelines of the agreement. A total of 6,600 Palestinians were incarcerated in Israeli prisons before the recent releases, according to the Prisoners’ Club, a Palestinian detainee advocacy NGO.
“Too many” victims
Without calling into question the right of their ally “to defend itself”, the United States warned Israel against the increase in civilian victims. “Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed,” insisted American Vice President Kamala Harris since COP28 in Dubai, alarmed by “devastating” images from Gaza and calling on Israel to “do more to protect innocent civilians.” “We completely agree that far too many people were killed in this war and would still be alive” if Hamas had not launched its October 7 attack, the government spokesperson responded on Sunday Israeli Eylon Levy.
In the Gaza Strip, the strikes destroyed or damaged more than half of the homes, according to the UN, whose Secretary General Antonio Guterres spoke of “a monumental humanitarian catastrophe”. The needs are immense in the territory subjected to a “complete siege” by Israel since October 9, where 1.8 million people, out of 2.4 million inhabitants, have been displaced by the war according to the UN .
“No safe place in Gaza”
The UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, ruled that the evacuation orders given by Israel to the population meant that “hundreds of thousands of people found themselves confined to increasingly small areas”. He was concerned about the lack of water, food and healthcare, especially since there is, according to him, “no safe place in Gaza”.
At the Nasser hospital in Khan Younes, Ehab al-Najjar, a nearby resident, let his anger explode. “I went home and saw the bomb fall on our house,” he told AFP, describing bodies in the street. “Half were young children. What was their fault? (…) Don’t they have pity? » In the neighboring town of Rafah, residents trampling in the rubble gathered around a huge crater. “It’s an extraordinary bombardment. We don’t know why. We don’t know for what purpose,” exclaimed one of them, Mohammad Fahjan.
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