Israel increased air raids on the besieged Gaza Strip on Friday, after warning that the war against Hamas would last a long time despite American pressure to reduce the intensity of strikes and protect civilians. Visiting Israel, American envoy Jake Sullivan pleaded for control of Gaza to return to the Palestinians at the end of the war, triggered 70 days ago by the bloody attack by Hamas, in power in the Palestinian territory. , on Israeli soil.
The main information:
– The remains of Franco-Israeli hostage Elya Toledano have been recovered in Gaza
– The destruction of Hamas will take “more than a few months” according to the Israeli defense minister
– Israel authorizes “temporary” entry of aid through one of its crossing points
– Houthi attacks ‘endanger’ Israel and international shipping, says Berlin
Hamas announces new assessment
Hamas announced this Friday that Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip had left 18,800 dead since the start of the conflict on October 7.
The dead Palestinians, mostly killed in airstrikes, are 75% children (8,000) and women (6,200), Hamas said in a statement, which estimates the number of missing on the 70th day of the war at 7,500. with Israel.
Israel announces the death of three hostages killed “by mistake”
The Israeli military announced Friday that soldiers operating in the Gaza Strip killed three Israeli hostages “misidentified” as a “threat.” “During fighting in Shujaiya (north), the army mistakenly identified three Israeli hostages as a threat. As a result, the soldiers opened fire in their direction and they were killed,” said the spokesperson for the army, Daniel Hagari, on television.
The victims are Yotam Haïm and Samer al-Talalka, both kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Am during the deadly Hamas attack in southern Israel on October 7, said an army statement. The family of the third hostage killed did not want his identity made public. Their bodies were repatriated to Israel. The army emphasizes that they died “in an active combat zone” in which its soldiers have been waging “a continuous battle for several days” against Hamas fighters. She expressed her “deep regrets” to the victims’ families, adding that “her mission is to locate the missing and bring the hostages home.”
Israel authorizes “temporary” entry of aid through one of its crossing points
Israel announced on Friday that it had “temporarily” approved the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip through one of its crossing points, in order to decongest the Rafah crossing between the Palestinian territory and Egypt. “The cabinet temporarily approved the unloading of trucks on the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom crossing rather than sending them back to Rafah,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. “The cabinet decision specifies that only humanitarian aid from Egypt will be delivered to Gaza in this way.”
EU: “We are very far from effective enlargement” to Ukraine, says Macron
French President Emmanuel Macron stressed on Friday that the European Union was still “very far from enlargement” to Ukraine and that this would require a reform of its operating rules. “We are very far from effective enlargement to Ukraine,” he said, when asked about the concerns of European farmers. “Any enlargement whatsoever will require an in-depth reform of our rules,” he added.
Joint EU, Australia and Canada call to end Israeli settler violence
The European Union, Australia, Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom and Switzerland on Friday urged Israel to “take concrete measures to stop the unprecedented violence by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.”
Firmly condemning the violence committed by extremist settlers, who terrorize Palestinian communities, they denounce Israel’s “inability to protect the Palestinians” and ask it to bring to justice those responsible for this violence, according to a joint statement sent by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Several bombings on the Gaza Strip
Clouds of smoke rose Friday in the north of the Gaza Strip and in Khan Younes, the large southern city where Hamas reported “dozens of dead and injured” in bombings. The neighboring town of Rafah was also hit. “We were sleeping in our house and suddenly there was a strike, like a barrel bomb,” a barrel filled with explosives, survivor Bakr Abu Hajjaj told AFP. “There are wounded, everything is destroyed, we have been suffering this war and this destruction for 70 days,” he added.
The October 7 attack, unprecedented in Israel’s history, left around 1,200 dead, mostly civilians, according to the authorities. In retaliation, Israel promised to “destroy” Hamas. In the Gaza Strip, 18,787 people, 70% of them women, children and adolescents, were killed by Israeli bombardments, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health. The war plunged the territory into a serious humanitarian crisis and 1.9 million inhabitants, or 85% of its population, were displaced, according to the UN, many of whom had to flee several times in the face of the spreading fighting. .
“Collapse of civil order” in the Gaza Strip
The UN warned Thursday of a “collapse of civil order” in the Gaza Strip, saying hunger and desperation were pushing residents to grab humanitarian aid, which is arriving in very limited quantities via Egypt. “Everywhere we go, people are desperate, hungry and terrified,” said the Commissioner General of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini.
Telecommunications remained cut once again on Friday, further isolating the small territory subjected by Israel to a total siege since October 9. “There will be more difficult battles in the coming days,” warned Daniel Hagari, an army spokesperson.
Three bodies of hostages recovered, including Franco-Israeli Elya Toledano
In total, according to the army, 119 soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the ground offensive began on October 27. This offensive allowed Israel to take control of several sectors in the north, before extending to the south where hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced by the war gathered.
Some 250 people were kidnapped on the day of the attack, 132 of whom the military said remained in the hands of Hamas and affiliated groups after the release of 105 hostages during a seven-day truce that ended Dec. 1. The army announced Friday that it had recovered the bodies of three hostages, including those of two 19-year-old soldiers, Nik Beizer and Ron Sherman, as well as that of a Franco-Israeli hostage, Elya Toledano.
‘Separating’ and ‘isolating’ Gaza Strip from Palestinian state ‘unacceptable,’ says Abbas
Israel’s main ally, the United States, is showing signs of impatience with the heavy civilian losses in Gaza. President Joe Biden said Tuesday that Israel risks losing international support because of its “indiscriminate” bombing. Washington wants the Israeli offensive to shift to “lower intensity operations” in the “near future”, according to the White House.
But at the end of the war, it would “not be right” for Israel to occupy Gaza in the long term, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in Tel Aviv on Friday before heading to Ramallah. , in the occupied West Bank.
The Israeli government, Jake Sullivan emphasized, has itself “made it known that it has no intention of occupying Gaza in the long term, and that the control of Gaza, the administration of Gaza and security of Gaza should return to the Palestinians. Any attempt to “separate” and “isolate” the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian state is “unacceptable,” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told the American envoy.
Destroying Hamas ‘will take time, more than a few months’, says Israel
Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, from where the Palestinian Authority was driven out in 2007 by Hamas, classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned Thursday that the war would last. Hamas “has established underground and aerial infrastructure that is not easy to destroy. It will take time – more than a few months – but we will defeat and destroy” Hamas, he said.
In the Gaza Strip, civilians are being forced into ever smaller areas, seeking to escape strikes, in desperate humanitarian conditions. In the far south, Rafah, a border town with Egypt, has become a gigantic camp, made up of hundreds of tents cobbled together using pieces of wood, sheets and plastic tarpaulins, where the displaced take shelter. somehow in the rain, as winter and cold set in.
But here too, the strikes are daily. “This is a refugee camp, with houses connected together. As you see, they are destroyed. As you see, there is debris everywhere (…), it is a neighborhood inhabited which has nothing to do with combatant activities,” Abou Omar, a resident who was searching the rubble on Friday, told AFP.
In the north, Israeli soldiers supported by tanks launched an assault on the Kamal Adwane hospital in Beit Lahiya on Thursday, for the third consecutive day, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha), while that another hospital in the same region, Al-Awda, in Jabalia, remains surrounded by the army.
Tensions in the Red Sea
The UN continues to repeat that humanitarian aid, entry into the territory of which is subject to Israeli authorization, is insufficient and that overpopulation in the camps leads to disease, in addition to hunger and poverty. lack of care.
The war has reignited tensions on the Israeli-Lebanese border and in the occupied West Bank, but also in the Red Sea, where Yemen’s Houthi rebels, allies of Hamas, claimed two attacks on Friday against ships en route to Israel. The Houthis “represent a concrete threat to free navigation” in the Red Sea, Jake Sullivan said.
“Houthi attacks on civilian merchant ships in the Red Sea must stop immediately,” the minister also declared at a press conference in Berlin. “Not only do these attacks endanger Israel’s security, but they also threaten international maritime transport,” she added, while an attacked container ship belongs to the German shipowner Hapag-Lloyd.