NAJIB JOBAIN, SAM MAGDY and ELENA BECATOROS
Sat, December 9, 2023
RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli warplanes struck parts of the Gaza Strip overnight into Saturday in relentless bombardments, including some of the dwindling slivers of land Palestinians had been told to evacuate to in the territory’s south.
The latest strikes came a day after the United States vetoed a United Nations resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza, despite it being backed by the vast majority of Security Council members and many other nations. The vote in the 15-member council was 13-1, with the United Kingdom abstaining.
“Attacks from air, land and sea are intense, continuous and widespread,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said before the vote. Gaza residents “are being told to move like human pinballs – ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survival.”
Guterres told the council that Gaza was at “a breaking point” with the humanitarian support system at risk of total collapse, and that he feared “the consequences could be devastating for the security of the entire region.”
Gaza’s borders with Israel and with Egypt are effectively sealed, leaving Palestinians with no option other than to try to seek refuge within the territory. The overall death toll in Gaza since the start of the war has surpassed 17,400, the majority of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its count.
Israel holds Hamas responsible for civilian casualties, accusing the militants of using civilians as human shields, and says it’s made considerable efforts with its evacuation orders to get civilians out of harm’s way.
On Saturday, Gaza residents reported airstrikes and shelling in the northern part of the strip as well as in the south, including the city of Rafah, which lies near the Egyptian border and where the Israeli army had ordered civilians to evacuate to.
The main hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah received the bodies of 71 people killed in bombings in the area over the past 24 hours, the Health Ministry said Saturday morning. The hospital also received 160 wounded, the ministry said. In the southern city of Khan Younis, the bodies of 62 people and another 99 wounded were taken to Nasser Hospital over the past 24 hours, the ministry said.
Israel has been trying to secure the military’s hold on northern Gaza, where furious fighting has underscored heavy resistance from the territory’s Hamas rulers. Tens of thousands of residents are believed to remain in the area despite evacuation orders, six weeks after troops and tanks rolled in during the war sparked by Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 raid targeting civilians in Israel.
About 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the Hamas raid, and more than 240 people taken hostage. A temporary truce saw hostages and Palestinian prisoners released, but more than 130 hostages are believed to remain in Gaza.
More than 2,200 Palestinians have been killed since the Dec. 1 collapse of the truce, about two-thirds women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Despite growing international pressure, the Biden administration remains opposed to an open-ended cease-fire, arguing it would enable Hamas to survive and pose a threat to Israel. Officials have expressed misgivings in recent days about the rising civilian death toll and dire humanitarian crisis, but have not pushed publicly for Israel to wind down the war, now in its third month.
“We have not given a firm deadline to Israel, not really our role,” deputy national security adviser Jon Finer told a security forum a day before the U.S. veto in the U.N. Security Council. “That said, we do have influence, even if we don’t have ultimate control over what happens on the ground in Gaza.”
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant argued a cease-fire would be a victory for Hamas. “A cease-fire is handing a prize to Hamas, dismissing the hostages held in Gaza, and signalling terror groups everywhere," he said. "Stand with Israel in our mission - we are fighting for our future, and we are fighting for the free world.”
As fighting resumed after a brief truce more than a week ago, the U.S. urged Israel to do more to protect civilians and allow more aid to besieged Gaza. The appeals came as Israel expanded its blistering air and ground campaign into southern Gaza, especially the southern city of Khan Younis, sending tens of thousands more fleeing.
"It was a night of heavy gunfire and shelling as every night,” Taha Abdel-Rahman, a Khan Younis resident, said by phone early Saturday.
Gaza’s Civil Defense Department said at least one person was killed late Friday in Rafah and others wounded in an airstrike on a family home.
The department posted images showing first responders and residents using flashlights and the light from cell phones to search the rubble of the house for potential survivors. One crane was seen removing the rubble while rescuers cut through iron poles amid collapsed concrete roofs.
Airstrikes were reported overnight in the Nuseirat refugee camp, where resident Omar Abu Moghazi said a strike hit a family home, causing casualties.
There were also airstrikes and shelling in Gaza City and other northern parts of the strip.
“It’s a routine,” Mohamed Abded, who lives in Gaza City's Zaytoun neighborhood, said of the bombardment. “You have only one option: leave or they will kill you. That’s the case across the north.”
Israel has designated a narrow patch of barren coastline in the south, Muwasi, as a safe zone. But Palestinians who have headed there portrayed a grim picture of desperately overcrowded conditions with scant shelter and poor hygiene facilities.
“We didn’t see anything good here at all. We are living here in a tough cold. There are no bathrooms. We are sleeping on the sand,” said Soad Qarmoot, a Palestinian woman who was forced to leave her home in the northern town of Beit Lahiya.
“I am a cancer patient,” Qarmoot said late Friday as children circled a wood fire for warmth. “There is no mattress for me to sleep on. I am sleeping on the sand. It’s freezing.”
Imad al-Talateeny, a displaced man from Gaza City, said the area lacks basic services to accommodate the growing number of displaced families.
“I lack everything to feel a human,” he said, adding that he had a peaceful, comfortable life before the war in Gaza City.
“Here I’m not safe,” he said. “Here I live in a desert. There is no gas, no water. The water that we drink is polluted water.”
___
Magdy reported from Cairo and Becatoros from Athens, Greece.
A Palestinian child wounded in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip is treated in Khan Younis on Friday, Dec. 8, 2023.
(AP Photos/Mohammed Dahman)
Israel increases Gaza strikes, UN decries 'humanitarian nightmare'
Updated Fri, December 8, 2023
By Bassam Masoud and Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA/CAIRO (Reuters) - Israel sharply increased strikes on the Gaza Strip, pounding the length of the Palestinian enclave and killing hundreds in a new, expanded phase of the war, as the U.S. on Friday again signalled that Israel could do more to protect civilians in the enclave.
The Israeli military said it had struck more than 450 targets in Gaza from land, sea and air over the past 24 hours - the most since a truce with Hamas collapsed last week and about double the daily figures typically reported since.
Decrying a "spiralling humanitarian nightmare", U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declared that nowhere in Gaza was safe for civilians, hours before the U.S. vetoed a Security Council demand for a humanitarian ceasefire. The vote, including 13 members in favor and one abstaining, diplomatically isolated Washington as it shielded ally Israel.
"We are at breaking point," he told the U.N. Security Council, saying the collapse of the humanitarian system could result in a complete breakdown of public order.
"The people of Gaza are being told to move like human pinballs – ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survival," he said, referring to Israeli instructions to Gazan civilians to move to safe areas.
In Washington, the White House on Friday said more could be done by Israel to reduce civilian casualties and the U.S. shared international concerns about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
"We certainly all recognize more can be done to try to reduce civilian casualties," White House national security council spokesman John Kirby told reporters.
On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in Washington that it was imperative Israel took steps to protect Gaza's civilian population. "And there does remain a gap between...the intent to protect civilians and the actual results that we're seeing on the ground," he told a press conference.
With most Gazans now displaced and unable to access any aid, hospitals overrun and food running out, the main U.N. agency there said society was "on the verge of a full-blown collapse" and its ability to protect people there was "reducing fast".
Residents and the Israeli military both reported intensified fighting in both northern areas, where Israel had previously said its troops had largely completed their tasks last month, and in the south where they mounted a new assault this week.
Gaza's health ministry reported 350 people killed on Thursday, and on Friday it said the death toll from Israel's campaign in Gaza had risen to 17,487, with thousands more missing and presumed buried under rubble. More strikes were reported on Friday morning in Khan Younis in the south, the Nusseirat camp in the centre and Gaza City in the north.
On Friday evening, residents reported intensified Israeli tank fire on the districts of Shejaia, Nafaq, Sabra and Jala in north Gaza, while health officials said at least 10 people were killed in an air strike on a house in Khan Younis.
Israel's military said 94 Israeli soldiers had been killed fighting in Gaza since its ground invasion of the densely populated, coastal enclave began in late October in retaliation for Hamas' rampage in southern Israel in which it killed 1,200 people and took 1,200 more than 240 hostages.
An Israeli commander, Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfuss, said in a video message recorded in Khan Younis that his forces were fighting house to house and "shaft to shaft", a reference to tunnel shafts. As he spoke, gunshots rang out in the background.
'FEAR, HUNGER AND COLD'
Israel launched what it says is a campaign to destroy Hamas after the Islamist militant group's bloody Oct. 7 cross-border raid.
Since then, most of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes. With fighting now going on across both halves of Gaza, residents say it has become almost impossible to find refuge.
While the U.S. has backed humanitarian "pauses" in the fighting to allow for the release of hostages and delivery of aid, it has refused to join international calls for a ceasefire, saying that would only give Hamas time to regroup and rearm.
Israel says it is providing detail about which areas are safe and how to reach them, and says Hamas is to blame for harm that befalls civilians because it operates among them, an accusation the Islamist group denies.
Hamas reported the most intense clashes with Israeli forces were taking place in the north in Shejaia, as well as in the south in Khan Younis, where Israeli forces reached the heart of the enclave's second-biggest city on Wednesday.
Israel's military said two of its troops were severely injured in an unsuccessful operation to rescue hostages held in Gaza. It said "numerous terrorists" were killed.
Israel's chief military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said Israel had detained more than 200 suspects from Gaza in the last 48 hours and that dozens of them were taken to Israel for questioning, adding Hamas commanders were among them.
Hamas' armed wing said it had thwarted an attempt to free a captured Israeli soldier, which it said resulted in his death, and that Israeli bombing over Gaza had resulted in the death and injuries of other Israeli hostages.
Reuters journalists in southern Gaza have seen dead and wounded swamping the main Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where there was no room on the floor on Friday for arriving patients sprawled across blood-smeared tiles.
"We are staying in an area that is, according to maps, a safe area," said Mohamed al-Amouri, adjusting an oxygen mask for his school-aged son who lay on a hospital bed in soccer shorts with his legs bandaged and his body lacerated.
"Children were on the streets playing, living life normally... We went out after the hit, hearing screams, to find youth, children, women and men in body parts - among them martyrs (dead) and injured."
Residents reached by telephone elsewhere in Gaza described similar scenes of desperation. With the fighting now going on in all directions, there was no place left to flee, said Yamen, sheltering at a school in central Gaza with his family.
"Inside the school is like outside it: the same feeling of fear of near death, the same suffering of starvation," he said. "Every day we say we somehow survived. But for how long?"
The World Food Programme said it was becoming impossible to get supplies to hungry people in the Gaza Strip.
In Ramallah on the West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Reuters an international peace conference was necessary to end the war and work out a lasting political solution leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Thomas White, Gaza head of UNRWA, the U.N. aid agency for Palestinians, wrote on X: "Civil order is breaking down in Gaza - the streets feel wild, particularly after dark - some aid convoys are being looted and U.N. vehicles stoned."
(Reporting by Bassam Masoud in Gaza, Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo, Dan Williams and Henriette Chacar in Jerusalem, Humeyra Pamuk and Simon Lewis in Washington, Gabrielle Tetrault-Farber in Geneva, Michelle Nichols in New York and Reuters bureaux; Witing by Peter Graff, William Maclean and Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Angus MacSwan, Mark Heinrich and Diane Craft)
US wags finger at Israel over Gaza civilian toll
Reuters Videos
Updated Fri, December 8, 2023
STORY: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday made his strongest public criticism so far of Israel's conduct of the war in south Gaza.
"It remains imperative that Israel put a premium on civilian protection. And there does remain a gap between the intent to protect civilians and the actual results that we're seeing on the ground."
Blinken was speaking at a news conference following a meeting with Britain's foreign secretary in Washington.
It comes as Israeli forces continue their bombardment of the Palestinian enclave, battling Hamas militants in Gaza's biggest cities.
Israel has said it is doing everything possible to get civilians out of harm's way, including warnings about military operations.
Blinken is due to meet top diplomats from Arab states, including Egypt, in Washington on Friday.
The United Arab Emirates has asked for the U.N. Security Council to vote on Friday morning on a draft resolution for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.
But the United States, which has veto power in the council, opposes a ceasefire because it believes that would only benefit Hamas.
According to the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden spoke separately by phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jordan's King Abdullah, stressing the "critical need" to protect civilians.
And in a further development on humanitarian assistance:
Israel has agreed to a U.S. request to open the Kerem Shalom border crossing, at the junction of Gaza, Egypt and Israel, to screen aid trucks headed for Gaza.
That's according to a senior U.S. official, who said it would help speed up the inspection process for desperately-needed aid to be sent to Gaza through the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
On the time frame of the border opening, an Israeli official told reporters on Thursday, quote - "It will happen in the next few days."
Updated Fri, December 8, 2023
STORY: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday made his strongest public criticism so far of Israel's conduct of the war in south Gaza.
"It remains imperative that Israel put a premium on civilian protection. And there does remain a gap between the intent to protect civilians and the actual results that we're seeing on the ground."
Blinken was speaking at a news conference following a meeting with Britain's foreign secretary in Washington.
It comes as Israeli forces continue their bombardment of the Palestinian enclave, battling Hamas militants in Gaza's biggest cities.
Israel has said it is doing everything possible to get civilians out of harm's way, including warnings about military operations.
Blinken is due to meet top diplomats from Arab states, including Egypt, in Washington on Friday.
The United Arab Emirates has asked for the U.N. Security Council to vote on Friday morning on a draft resolution for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.
But the United States, which has veto power in the council, opposes a ceasefire because it believes that would only benefit Hamas.
According to the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden spoke separately by phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jordan's King Abdullah, stressing the "critical need" to protect civilians.
And in a further development on humanitarian assistance:
Israel has agreed to a U.S. request to open the Kerem Shalom border crossing, at the junction of Gaza, Egypt and Israel, to screen aid trucks headed for Gaza.
That's according to a senior U.S. official, who said it would help speed up the inspection process for desperately-needed aid to be sent to Gaza through the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
On the time frame of the border opening, an Israeli official told reporters on Thursday, quote - "It will happen in the next few days."
Gaza has gone 'far beyond' a humanitarian crisis -medical charity MSF
Thu, December 7, 2023
Smoke rises over Gaza, as seen from southern Israel
By Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber
GENEVA (Reuters) - The head of medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said on Thursday that Gaza faces a catastrophe extending far beyond a humanitarian crisis, describing the situation in the densely populated enclave as chaotic.
Israeli forces battled Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip's biggest cities on Thursday in a new phase of the war that is now entering its third month, with wide areas of the narrow territory flattened by Israeli bombardment and 85% of the 2.3 million population left homeless, according to U.N. figures.
"My people on the ground keep updating me on the situation, and I can tell you that it has gone far beyond the humanitarian crisis," Dr Christos Christou, international president of Doctors Without Borders, told reporters in Geneva.
"It is a humanitarian catastrophe. It is a chaotic situation, and I'm extremely worried that very soon people will be in a mode of just trying to survive, which will come with very severe consequences."
In a bid to escape Israeli bombardment, Gazans have amassed at the southern tip of Gaza, heeding Israeli leaflets and messages saying that they would be safe on the border with Egypt. The United Nations and aid organisations have said that nowhere is safe in Gaza.
"The people have been asked to be squeezed in a very small area," Christou said. "My teams on the ground keep saying to me that it is unbearable. It is unsustainable ... There is no safe place."
In an open letter to the U.N. Security Council published on Monday, Christou implored the body to demand an end to Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians and allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza unimpeded.
Israel says it does its utmost to minimise civilian casualties but that Hamas combatants use built-up residential areas for cover, something the Islamist militant group denies.
(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Thu, December 7, 2023
Smoke rises over Gaza, as seen from southern Israel
By Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber
GENEVA (Reuters) - The head of medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said on Thursday that Gaza faces a catastrophe extending far beyond a humanitarian crisis, describing the situation in the densely populated enclave as chaotic.
Israeli forces battled Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip's biggest cities on Thursday in a new phase of the war that is now entering its third month, with wide areas of the narrow territory flattened by Israeli bombardment and 85% of the 2.3 million population left homeless, according to U.N. figures.
"My people on the ground keep updating me on the situation, and I can tell you that it has gone far beyond the humanitarian crisis," Dr Christos Christou, international president of Doctors Without Borders, told reporters in Geneva.
"It is a humanitarian catastrophe. It is a chaotic situation, and I'm extremely worried that very soon people will be in a mode of just trying to survive, which will come with very severe consequences."
In a bid to escape Israeli bombardment, Gazans have amassed at the southern tip of Gaza, heeding Israeli leaflets and messages saying that they would be safe on the border with Egypt. The United Nations and aid organisations have said that nowhere is safe in Gaza.
"The people have been asked to be squeezed in a very small area," Christou said. "My teams on the ground keep saying to me that it is unbearable. It is unsustainable ... There is no safe place."
In an open letter to the U.N. Security Council published on Monday, Christou implored the body to demand an end to Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians and allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza unimpeded.
Israel says it does its utmost to minimise civilian casualties but that Hamas combatants use built-up residential areas for cover, something the Islamist militant group denies.
(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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