Israel hits Rafah with air strikes and takes control of border crossing

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Written by Super User

Category: MENA

Published: 07 May 2024

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GAZA - Israel’s military has carried out “targeted strikes” against Hamas in eastern Rafah hours after rejecting Hamas’s agreement to a ceasefire deal.

Israel’s forces hit Gaza’s southern edge from the air and ground and ordered residents to leave parts of the city, which has been a refuge for more than a million displaced Palestinians.

Witnesses described “continuous” Israeli bombardment, despite US president Joe Biden warning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against launching an offensive in the city.

While just after 6am on Tuesday the Israeli military said its forces had taken control of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing with Egypt. The IDF said its forces carried out operations which saw the crossing captured and cut off from the major Salah al Din road.

Some 20 gunmen were killed and troops located three "significant" tunnel shafts, the IDF added.

The current activity inside the city itself was described as a "very precise and limited-in-space counterterrorist operation… within specific areas inside eastern Rafah".

Israel believes that a significant number of Hamas fighters, along with potentially dozens of hostages, are in Rafah and has said that victory requires taking the key city.

It pushed ahead with military action after the Hamas militant group announced it had accepted a ceasefire proposal brought forward by mediators Egypt and Qatar early on Monday evening. Israel responded by saying the proposal did not meet its “core demands”.

Ceasefire talks, that could end seven months of war in Gaza, are to resume in Cairo on Tuesday.It comes as the officials from the US Biden administration on Monday continued to express concerns to Israel that a major military operation into Rafah’s densely populated areas could be catastrophic.

Mr Biden urged Mr Netanyahu not to carry out its offensive in Gaza in a 30 minute phone call.

The divide between the two leaders continues to grow along with the mounting Palestinian death toll.

Both leaders are facing growing public pressure - Mr Biden from protests on college campuses and Mr Netanyahu from the families of some Israeli hostages - for a ceasefire deal.

“The president doesn’t want to see operations in Rafah that put at greater risk the more than a million people that are seeking refuge there,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby said.

The White House described the leaders’ talks as “constructive”.

More than a million people are huddled in tents and overcrowded apartments in Rafah after fleeing Israel’s military offensive in other parts of the Gaza Strip.

Israel says Rafah is Hamas’ last stronghold. Still, the United States opposes a full-scale invasion of the city bordering Egypt unless Israel provides a “credible” plan for protecting civilians there.

The war in Gaza has driven around 80% of the territory’s population of 2.3 million from their homes and caused vast destruction to apartments, hospitals, mosques and schools across several cities. The death toll in Gaza has soared to more than 34,500 people, according to local health officials.

An Israeli strike on a house in Rafah in the latest military strikes killed five Palestinians, including a woman and a girl, medics said.

Armed factions in Gaza fired rockets into southern Israel in response.The war began on October 7 when Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting about 250 others.

Israel says militants still hold around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.

Israel tells over 100,000 Palestinians to evacuate eastern Rafah before ground invasion

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Written by Super User

Category: MENA

Published: 06 May 2024

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JERUSALEM - The Israeli military has called on more than 100,000 Palestinians to evacuate eastern Rafah ahead of a long-expected ground invasion, and despite warnings from the United Nations of a burgeoning humanitarian catastrophe and an imminent “bloodbath”.

The Israeli military have begun dropping flyers to Palestinians sheltering in Rafah relief camps where the military is set to “operate with force” against Hamas, it said.

People have been asked to move to what Israel described as the “humanitarian zone” at Al-Mawasi as the army prepared for a “limited scope operation”, without confirming when the Rafah invasion would begin. Families in Rafah told The Independent there was a state of panic after the evacuation orders and that Al-Mawasi was “not a liveable place” and also not safe.

“In accordance with the approval of the political echelon, the IDF is calling on the population, which is under the control of Hamas, to temporarily evacuate from the eastern neighbourhoods of Rafah to the expanded humanitarian space,” a statement from the IDF said on Monday.

It said that it was contacting Palestinians through “announcements, text messages, phone calls and media broadcasts in Arabic”.

The army has begun dropping red and blue flyers that warn those sheltering in the Rafah Camp, the Brazil Camp and the neighbourhood of Al-Shabura to evacuate immediately.

The translated message from Arabic on the flyers reads: “Remaining in these areas puts your lives in danger.”

“The IDF is about to operate with force against the terror organizations in the area you currently reside, as the IDF has operated so far,” it added.

The evacuation notices came as prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to walk away from ceasefire talks that are due to continue through to Tuesday, after refusing to agree to Hamas’s demands to withdraw Israeli forces from Gaza.

Families in Rafah who have already been displaced multiple times said people were panicking as they had no where to go. Nedal Hamdouna, who is twice displaced from North Gaza and is in the living in a tent with his extended family, said it was not possible for people to live in al-Mawasi. The tiny patch of coastal land that the Israeli military identified as the “humanitarian zone” is mostly sand dunes and packed with displaced people.

“Al-Mawasi is not a liveable place,” he told The Independent in desperation. “Before the war it was just empty beach land there is no infrastructure. We have had discussions about trying to move elsewhere but there is nowhere that is safe and liveable, with no water it’s all destroyed.”

“The question everyone is asking is where do we go? Al Mawasi is not big enough, and it’s already full. Hundreds of thousands of people are already living there, there are thousands of tents with no space between them. Also how do people get there?

“Everyone is worried and scared,” Nedal added.

Piling pressure on the misery were overnight air strikes on east Rafah which killed multiple people and the temporary closure of the land crossing to Kerem Shalom, which saw food prices in Rafah double overnight. Palestinian health officials said at least 19 people were killed by Israeli fire.UN officials told The Independent an Israeli military operation into Rafah, which is sheltering to 1.4 million people, most of them already displaced and half of them children, could "lead to a bloodbath."

Tamara al-Rifae, from the UN's Palestinian Refugee Agency UNRWA, told The Independent the potential impact from the assault would be "catastrophic".

"No amount of emergency planning can assuage the immense anxiety than most people in Rafah feel today, as news of an imminent incursion abound," she said, adding that UNRWA has pledged to stay put in the border town and continue humanitarian operations.

"The potential impact of such a military operation is catastrophic, given the level, scope and scale of the destruction that Gazans have already witnessed across the Strip for the last 7 months," she continued.

"An immediate humanitarian ceasefire is the only way to prevent more death and destruction."

Louise Wateridge, who also works for UNRWA and spoke to The Independent from inside Rafah, said that there had been a lot of hope of ceasefire coming over the last few days, but that had turned to “huge fear and concern” about safety as Israel’s Rafah assault looked imminent.

“Every person I’ve spoke to here has conveyed to me how scared they are of what is next,” she told The Independent from the border town in Gaza.

“Everybody is asking where do we go and what are they going to find? Even in Rafah there is not infrastructure despite having humanitarian operations based her and on the ground here for months because there are so many people in such a small place.”

She said a recent heatwave in Rafah actually killed people who were sheltering in plastic tents which provide no shelter. “This looming threat of additional displacement really threatens to push the community past its breaking point. It’s exasperating already dire living conditions and placing hundreds of 1000s of people at increased risk.”

Defence minister Yoav Gallant said on Monday that Israeli military action was required in Rafah due to Hamas’s refusal to mediate proposals for a truce and release Israeli hostages.

Mr Netanyahu has been unrelenting in his plans to invade Rafah despite warnings that it will lead to massive casualties among the civilians sheltering there. Israel has faced calls from both world leaders and humanitarian agencies to call off its assault.

Rafah sits at the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt at the far south of the Hamas-controlled enclave, and has become increasingly overcrowded with up to a million Palestinians sheltering there from the Israeli offensive to the north.

The Israeli army describes Rafah as the last stronghold for Hamas and claims that between 5,000 to 8,000 of its fighters and senior leaders are holed up in the city.

On Sunday three Israeli soldiers were killed after Hamas militants carried out a deadly rocket attack from the Kerem Shalom crossing in Rafah.

The IDF claimed that 10 projectiles were fired from a part of Rafah crossing in southern Gaza, about 3.6km (2.2 miles) from a major crossing used for the delivery of aid. Hamas’s armed wing claimed responsibility for the attack.

Over 10,000 people feared buried under the rubble in Gaza

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Written by Super User

Category: MENA

Published: 03 May 2024

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GAZA - More than 10,000 people are believed buried under the rubble in Gaza after nearly seven months of devastating conflict, UN humanitarians said on Thursday, citing the enclave’s health authorities.

“It could take up to three years to retrieve the bodies using the primitive tools they have on hand,” the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, said, amid rising temperatures that will accelerate the decomposition of bodies, potentially increasing the threat of disease spreading.

Citing the Palestinian civil defence authority, OCHA said that the recovery of dead bodies from the debris is a huge challenge, owing to a lack of bulldozers, excavators and personnel.

Entire neighbourhoods have been levelled amid intense and ongoing Israeli bombardment “across much of the Gaza Strip” from the air, land and sea, the UN aid office noted.

‘Nightmare’ must end: UNICEF chief

In a call for an end to the hostilities, sparked by Hamas-led terror raids on southern Israel on 7 October that killed some 1,250 people and saw more than 250 taken hostage, top UN humanitarian official Catherine Russell insisted that the “nightmare” must end.

Nearly all of the 600,000 children now sheltering in the southern border city of Rafah are “injured, sick or malnourished”, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) chief said in a video post on X on Wednesday.

“Over 200 days of war have already killed and maimed tens of thousands of children in Gaza,” Ms. Russell added, amid deepening fears of a full-scale Israeli military operation in Rafah.

1,000-pound bombs

Following the withdrawal of Israeli troops last month from the southern city of Khan Younis, a UN assessment team mission on 10 April reported that streets and public spaces were littered with unexploded weapons. In addition, 1,000-pound bombs were found “lying on main intersections and inside schools".

UN-led efforts are ongoing to make areas safe for Gazans to return to Khan Younis, including damage assessments at facilities belonging to the UN refugee agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) and mapping high-risk areas containing shrapnel and unexploded ordnance.

Another vital aspect of this work is awareness-raising sessions, which the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) conducts via social media, mobile phone text messages and leaflets to around 1.2 million people in Gaza, as part of aid packages distributed by other humanitarian partners.

In total there is an estimated 37 million tonnes of debris in the enclave which likely contains about 800,000 tonnes of asbestos and other contaminants.

UN mine action experts have estimated that some 7,500 tonnes of unexploded ordnance could be “scattered” throughout Gaza which could take up to 14 years to clear. To mitigate the risk for civilians and aid teams in the meantime, the UN Mine Action Service, UNMAS, has issued increasingly urgent appeals for assistance from the international community to remove explosive remnants of war.

Rising toll

Between 29 April 1 May, OCHA reported that 80 Palestinians were killed and 118 injured amid Israeli bombardment, citing the Gazan health authorities. The same source has reported that since 7 October, at least 34,560 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and 77,765 injured.

This includes a strike on 29 April “at about 12:25pm” when two Palestinian women and two girls were reportedly killed and others injured when a house was hit in Tall As Sultan neighbourhood in western Rafah.

OCHA also reported that between 28 April and 1 May, two Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza, according to the Israeli military. As of 1 May, 262 Israeli soldiers.