- Palestinian death toll from nearly four weeks of bombardment climbs above 9,000
- WHO chief says forced evacuation of hospitals in Gaza Strip to put hundreds of patients at risk
JERUSALEM/ GAZA: Israeli tanks and troops pressed towards Gaza City on Thursday but met resistance from Hamas fighters using mortars and hit-and-run attacks from tunnels as the Palestinian death toll from nearly four weeks of bombardment climbed above 9,000.
The Gaza Strip’s main population centre in the north has become the focus of attack for Israel, which has vowed to annihilate the Palestinian group’s command structure and has told civilians to leave.
“We are at the gates of Gaza City,” Israeli military commander Brigadier General Itzik Cohen said.
Hamas and allied Islamic Jihad fighters were emerging from tunnels to fire at tanks, then disappearing back into the network, residents said and videos from both groups showed.
“They never stopped bombing Gaza City all night, the house never stopped shaking,” said one Palestinian man, asking not to be identified by name. “But in the morning we discover the Israeli forces are still outside the city, in the outskirts and that means the resistance is heavier than they expected.”
Aware of the difficulties of fighting in an urban environment, Israeli officers’ strategy appears for now to be concentrating large forces in the northern Gaza Strip rather than launching a ground assault on the entire territory.
As international calls for a humanitarian pause in hostilities go unheeded, Palestinians are suffering shortages of food, fuel, drinking water and medicine. Sewage is leaking, some are drinking salt water and the trickle of aid permitted in by Israel is a tiny proportion of what is needed.
Over a third of Gaza’s 35 hospitals are not functioning, with many turned into impromptu refugee camps and some rescuers using donkey carts instead of ambulances.
“The situation is beyond catastrophic in the hospitals,” said the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians, describing packed corridors and many medics themselves bereaved and homeless.
The head of Israel’s armed forces signalled willingness on Thursday to ease its embargo on fuel for Gaza, saying that if hospitals there run out they could be resupplied under supervision.
The United Arab Emirates offered to treat 1,000 children while Turkey offered to take cancer patients.
The latest war in the decades-old conflict began when Hamas fighters broke through the border on Oct. 7. Israel says they killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and took more than 200 hostages in the deadliest day of its 75-year history.
Israel’s ensuing bombardment of the small Palestinian enclave of 2.3 million people has killed at least 9,061 people, including 3,760 children and 2,326 women, according to Gaza health authorities.
Though Western nations and the United States in particular have traditionally supported Israel, harrowing images of bodies in the rubble and hellish conditions inside Gaza have triggered appeals for restraint and street protests around the world.
Residents reported mortar fire around Gaza City and said Israeli tanks and bulldozers were sometimes driving over rubble and knocking down structures rather than using regular roads.
Destruction across Gaza
People walk along a street as a plume of smoke rises in the background during an Israeli strike on the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on November 2, 2023. PHOTO: AFP
People walk along a street as a plume of smoke rises in the background during an Israeli strike on the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on November 2, 2023. PHOTO: AFP
Though Israel has told Gazans to go south, that part of the territory was not spared either. Three Palestinians died in tank shelling near the town of Khan Younis and an air strike killed five outside a UN school in Beach refugee camp, Gaza health officials said.
In central Gaza, an air strike destroyed clusters of houses in the Bureij refugee camp, residents and Gaza officials said, with 15 bodies pulled from the rubble.
“A massacre, a massacre,” people cried as they gathered corpses in blankets.
Brigadier General Iddo Mizrahi, chief of Israel’s military engineers, said troops were in a first stage of opening access routes in Gaza but were encountering mines and booby-traps.
“Hamas has learned and prepared itself well.”
After a total blockade of Gaza for more than three weeks, foreign passport-holders and some wounded were allowed out. Palestinian border official Wael Abu Mehsen said 400 foreign citizens would leave for Egypt via the Rafah crossing on Thursday, after some 320 on Wednesday.
Dozens of critically injured Palestinians were to cross too. Israel asked foreign countries to send hospital ships for them.
“I want to pass. We are not animals,” said Ghada el-Saka, an Egyptian at Rafah waiting to return home after visiting relatives. “We’ve seen death with our own eyes,” she added, describing a strike near her siblings’ house that had made her and her daughter live on the street.
Israel’s latest strikes have included the heavily populated area of Jabalia, set up as a refugee camp in 1948.
Gaza’s Hamas-run media office said at least 195 Palestinians were killed in the two hits on Tuesday and Wednesday, with 120 missing and at least 777 people hurt.
Israel, which accuses Hamas of hiding behind civilians, said it killed two Hamas commanders in Jabalia.
“We will hunt them down through night and day, in their cities and in their beds,” Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz said, warning of a long and complex fight.
With Arab nations vocal in their outrage at Israel’s actions, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said Israel’s “disproportionate attacks” may constitute war crimes.
Israel says it has lost 18 soldiers and killed dozens of fighters since ground operations were expanded on Friday.
Violence has also spread to the occupied West Bank, with Israeli raids touching off clashes with gunmen and people throwing stones.
Palestinian medics said three teenagers and a 25-year-old were killed there in clashes on Thursday. Israel’s army had no comment. Separately, the military and medics said Palestinian gunmen killed an Israeli motorist in the West Bank.
Gaza patients at risk in ‘indescribable’ situation – WHO
The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday the forced evacuation of hospitals in the Gaza Strip would put the lives of hundreds of patients at risk as he called the situation on the ground “indescribable”.
“Twenty-three hospitals have been ordered to evacuate in Gaza City and north Gaza, and forced evacuation in these circumstances would put the lives of hundreds of patients in a life threatening situation,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
At a press conference in Geneva, Tedros also reiterated the call for a humanitarian pause in the Israel-Hamas war to help the thousands injured, as well as the chronically sick.
More than 10,000 people have been killed, including more than 8,500 in Gaza and 1,400 in Israel, he said, mainly women and children on both sides.
There are also more than 21,000 people injured, as well as 1.4 million displaced in Gaza, he said, as well as many more with long-term conditions who needed care.
“We’re running out of words to describe the horror unfolding in Gaza,” said Tedros.
The WHO said 46 critically injured medical evacuees had left Gaza for care in Egypt since the Rafah crossing opened on Wednesday, and it had also provided 54 metric tonnes of medical aid to the territory, but nowhere near what was needed.
The situation in Gaza was “indescribable”, Tedros added, with hospitals crammed, morgues overflowing, and doctors performing surgery without anaesthesia, as families sought shelter and toilets overflowed, risking the spread of disease.
He also reiterated calls for Hamas to release Israeli hostages, many of whom need medical attention.
Emergencies director Dr Mike Ryan said the UN agency was struggling to help as it could not guarantee the safety of staff.
Israeli settler attacks fuel the fire as Gaza war rages
Mourning his father and brother, Mohammed Wadi says armed Israeli settlers from outposts overlooking his olive-growing West Bank village no longer aim low when they shoot at Palestinian neighbours. “Now, they shoot to kill,” he said.
Violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, already at a more than 15-year high this year, surged further after Israel hurtled into a new war in the separate enclave of Gaza in response to Palestinian group Hamas unleashing the deadliest day in Israel’s history on Oct. 7.
Days later, on Oct. 12, Wadi’s father and brother were shot dead when armed Israeli settlers and soldiers stopped a funeral cortege for three other Palestinians killed by settlers the day before, two Reuters witnesses and three other people present said. It was one of the more than 170 attacks on Palestinians involving settlers recorded by the UN since the Hamas rampage.
“Arabs and Jews used to throw stones at each other. Settlers my age now all seem to have automatic weapons,” said Wadi, 29, in the olive-growing village of Qusra. And while a decade ago armed settlers would fire their weapons to scare or injure villagers during confrontations, increasingly, shootings were deadly, he said.
Bahrain parliament says envoy to Israel returned home, Israel says ties stable
Bahrain’s parliament said on Thursday that the Gulf state’s ambassador to Israel had returned home and economic ties had been suspended in protest over the war in Gaza.
However, the government did not confirm the moves, and Israel said it had received no word of any such actions, saying its relations with Bahrain were “stable”.
In its statement, the parliament – a consultative body with no powers in the area of foreign policy – said the moves “confirmed Bahrain’s historic position in support of the Palestinian cause”.
“The Council of Representatives affirms that the Israeli ambassador in the kingdom of Bahrain has left Bahrain and the kingdom of Bahrain has decided on the return of the Bahrain ambassador to Israel,” the parliament said in a statement
“The cessation of economic relations was also decided,” it said, without making clear who had made the decision.
Reuters was not immediately able to confirm whether the two envoys had returned to their home countries.
Israel’s foreign ministry said in a statement: “We would like to clarify that no notification or decision has been received from the government of Bahrain and the government of Israel to return the countries’ ambassadors. Relations between Israel and Bahrain are stable.”
The parliament’s statement was not carried by the kingdom’s state television or its official news agency.
Any suspension of diplomatic and economic ties, if confirmed, would mark a significant setback for Israel.
Abraham Accords
Bahrain, which is home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, is a signatory of the Abraham Accords, a series of normalisation agreements between Israel and several Arab nations signed in 2020.
