GAZA: Israel declared its determination Wednesday to press on with its Gaza war “with or without international support,” after it came under mounting pressure even from key backer the United States.
Now in its third month, the war was launched after the unprecedented October 7 attacks on Israel by Palestinian militant group Hamas that officials say killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
It has left Gaza in ruins, killing more than 18,600 people, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, and causing “unparallelled” damage to roads, schools and hospitals.
The day after the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly backed a non-binding resolution for a ceasefire, more strikes hit Gaza and battles raged, especially in Gaza City, the biggest urban center, and Khan Yunis and Rafah in the south, AFP correspondents said.
Cold wintery rains lashed the territory, where the UN estimates 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.4 million population have been displaced, living in makeshift tents as vital supplies of food, drinking water, medicines and fuel run low.
Camped with thousands in the grounds of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in central Gaza, Ameen Edwan said his family was unable to sleep.
“Rainwater seeped in. We couldn’t sleep. We tried to find nylon covers but couldn’t find any, so we resorted to stones and sand” to keep the rain out, he said.
The United Nations warned the spread of diseases — including meningitis, jaundice, impetigo, chickenpox and upper respiratory tract infections — had intensified.
The World Health Organization said 107 trucks carrying humanitarian aid had entered the besieged territory from Egypt, well below the daily average of 500 before October 7.
Air raid sirens wailed in Sderot and other southern Israeli communities near Gaza as Palestinian militants fired rockets, most of which were intercepted.
Israel’s military said sirens sounded in Ashdod city north of Gaza and in the Lakhish area. Social media footage showed a large fragment of an intercepted rocket had hit a supermarket.
The army said an air strike had hit a militant cell in Gaza City’s Shejaiya district “that was en route to launch rockets toward Israel.”
In Khan Yunis, a family mourned father of seven Fayez Al-Taramsi, killed in a strike.
“How are we going to live after him?” one of his daughters said, crying and clutching his bloodied shirt. “He brought us to life.”
In the October 7 attack — the deadliest in Israel’s 75-year history — Hamas also seized around 240 hostages.
Determined to destroy Hamas and bring the hostages home, Israel began a devastating aerial and ground offensive.
It has lost 115 soldiers, including 10 in northern Gaza on Tuesday, its deadliest day since the ground assault began on October 27.
The UN General Assembly passed a resolution Tuesday demanding a ceasefire, backed by 153 of 193 nations — surpassing the 140 or so that have routinely condemned Russia for invading Ukraine.
While Washington voted against, the resolution was supported by allies Australia, Canada and New Zealand, who, in a rare joint statement, said they were “alarmed at the diminishing safe space for civilians in Gaza.”
US President Joe Biden told a campaign event Israel had “most of the world supporting it” immediately after October 7, but “they’re starting to lose that support by the indiscriminate bombing that takes place.”
Biden, who toned down his comments later, on Wednesday met with families of American hostages from those the militants seized.
Despite the criticism from its main ally, Israel vowed to pursue its war.
“Israel will continue the war against Hamas with or without international support,” said Foreign Minister Eli Cohen.
“A ceasefire at the current stage is a gift to the terrorist organization Hamas, and will allow it to return and threaten the residents of Israel,” Cohen told a visiting diplomat, quoted by his ministry.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later said Israel would persevere.
“We will continue until the end. There is no question at all. I say this in light of great pain, but also in light of international pressure. Nothing will stop us. We are going until the end, until victory, nothing less than that,” he said in a video statement.
Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, will travel to Israel on Thursday to meet Netanyahu, who has said there is “disagreement” with Washington over how a post-conflict Gaza would be governed.
Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh on Wednesday said that any plan for post-war Gaza that does not involve the Palestinian militant group “or the resistance factions is a delusion.”
Tuesday’s UN vote came as Philippe Lazzarini, head of its Palestinian refugee agency, said Gazans were “running out of time and options.”
The United States and Britain announced a new round of sanctions against Hamas over the October 7 attack, targeting “key officials who perpetuate Hamas’s violent agenda.”
Gaza’s hospital system is in ruins, and Hamas authorities said vaccines for children had run out, warning of “catastrophic health repercussions.”
The World Bank in a new analysis warned that “the loss of life, speed and extent of damages... are unparallelled.”
The Hamas-controlled health ministry said Israeli forces opened fire on wards of Kamal Adwan hospital in north Gaza, raising fears for the safety of 12 children in paediatric care.
The army has yet to comment, but Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of using hospitals, schools, mosques and vast tunnel systems beneath them as military bases — claims the group has denied.
Fears of the conflict broadening continued, with daily exchanges of fire along Israel’s border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based, and other Iran-backed groups targeting US and allied forces in Iraq and Syria.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog warned Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels had “crossed a red line,” after repeatedly launching missiles and drones toward Israel and cargo ships in the Red Sea.
Israel to pursue Gaza war ‘with or without international support’
https://arab.news/5tk2z
Israel to pursue Gaza war ‘with or without international support’
- Israeli attacks have left Gaza in ruins, killing more than 18,600 people, mostly women and children
- Benjamin Netanyahu: ‘Nothing will stop us. We are going until the end, until victory, nothing less than that’
Aid only ‘delaying deaths’ as Sudan counts down to famine: agency chief
“I met women barely surviving, eating one meal of boiled leaves a day“
CAIRO: War-torn Sudan is on a “countdown to famine” ignored by world leaders while humanitarian aid is only “delaying deaths,” Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) chief Jan Egeland told AFP on Saturday.
“We have the biggest humanitarian crisis on the planet in Sudan, the biggest hunger crisis, the biggest displacement crisis... and the world is giving it a shrug,” he said in an interview from neighboring Chad after a visit to Sudan this week.
Since April 2023, war has pitted Sudan’s regular army against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), killing tens of thousands of people and uprooting more than 11 million.
The United Nations says that nearly 26 million people inside Sudan are suffering acute hunger.
“I met women barely surviving, eating one meal of boiled leaves a day,” Egeland said.
One of few organizations to have maintained operations in Sudan, the NRC says some 1.5 million people are “on the edge of famine.”
“The violence is tearing apart communities much faster than we can come in with aid,” Egeland said.
“As we struggle to keep up, our current resources are merely delaying deaths instead of preventing them.”
Two decades ago, allegations of genocide brought world attention to Sudan’s vast western region of Darfur where the then government in Khartoum unleashed Arab tribal militias against non-Arab minorities suspected of supporting a rebellion.
“It is beyond belief that we have a fraction of the interest now for Sudan’s crisis than we had 20 years ago for Darfur, when the crisis was actually much smaller,” Egeland said.
He said Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon and Russia’s war with Ukraine had been allowed to overshadow the conflict in Sudan.
But he said he detected a shift in the “international mood,” away from the kind of celebrity-driven campaigns that brought Hollywood star George Clooney to Darfur in the 2000s.
“More nationalistic tendencies, more inward-looking,” he said of Western governments led by politicians compelled to “put my nation first, me first, not humanity first.”
“It will come to haunt” these “short-sighted” leaders, when those they failed to assist in their homeland join the tide of refugees and migrants headed north.
In Chad, he said he had met young people who just barely survived ethnic cleansing in Darfur, and had made the decision to brave the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean to Europe even though they had friends who had drowned.
Inside Sudan, one in every five people has been displaced by this or previous conflicts, according to UN figures.
Most of those displaced are in Darfur, where Egeland says the situation is “horrific and getting worse.”
The North Darfur state capital of El-Fasher has been under siege by the RSF for months, nearly disabling all aid operations in the region and pushing the nearby Zamzam displacement camp into famine.
But even areas spared the devastation of war “are bursting at the seams,” Egeland said. Across the army-controlled east, camps, schools and other public buildings are filled with displaced people left to fend for themselves.
On the outskirts of Port Sudan — the Red Sea city where the army-backed government and UN agencies are now based — Egeland said he visited a school sheltering more than 3,700 displaced people where mothers were unable to feed their children.
“How come next door to the easiest accessible part of Sudan... there is starvation?” he asked.
According to the UN, both sides are using hunger as a weapon of war. Authorities routinely impede access with bureaucratic hurdles, while paramilitary fighters have threatened and attacked aid workers.
“The ongoing starvation is a man-made tragedy... Each delay, every blocked truck, every authorization delayed is a death sentence for families who can’t wait another day for food, water and shelter,” Egeland said.
But in spite of all the obstacles, “it is possible to reach all corners of Sudan,” he said, calling on donors to increase funding and aid organizations to have more “guts.”
“Parties to conflicts specialize in scaring us and we specialize in being scared,” he said, urging UN and other agencies to “be tougher and demand access.”
Hamas armed wing says Israeli woman hostage killed in north Gaza
- Abu Obeida’s statement did not further identify the hostage or say how or when she was killed
- The woman had been held with a second female hostage whose life was in danger
GAZA: Hamas’s armed wing said Saturday an Israeli woman taken hostage during the October 2023 attack had been killed in a combat zone in northern Gaza and the Israeli military said it was investigating.
Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida said contact had been restored with the woman’s captors after a break of several weeks and it was established that the hostage had been killed in an area of north Gaza where the Israeli army has been operating.
Abu Obeida’s statement did not further identify the hostage or say how or when she was killed.
The Israeli army told AFP it was looking into the claim.
Abu Obeida said that the woman had been held with a second female hostage whose life was in danger.
During last year’s Hamas attack which triggered the Gaza war, militants took 251 hostages, of whom 97 are still held in Gaza, including 34 the army says are dead.
Ten female hostages, including five soldiers, were believed to remain alive in custody before Abu Obeida’s statement, according to an AFP tally.
During a one-week truce in November last year, 105 hostages were freed, including 80 Israelis who were exchanged for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
The Israeli government has come under immense public pressure to agree a new deal to bring the remaining hostages home while they are still alive.
The Hostage and Missing Families Forum campaign group did not wish to comment on Saturday’s claim.
“Nothing is known other than what Hamas is saying. Our only reliable source is the Israeli army,” the group told AFP.
Hamas’s attack on October 7 last year resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed 44,176 people in Gaza, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.
Fierce Israel-Hezbollah clashes at flashpoint town: Lebanon state media
- Israel was “attempting to control the town” as it was “a strategic gateway for a rapid ground incursion,” the NNA said
- It said Israeli troops had dynamited houses and were “trying to surround (Khiam) from all sides using extensive air and ground cover“
BEIRUT: Hezbollah fighters and Israeli troops engaged in fierce clashes Saturday at the key south Lebanon town of Khiam and in the coastal Bayada area several kilometers north of the border.
The official National News Agency (NNA) reported intense air and artillery bombardment of Khiam, about six kilometers (nearly four miles) from the frontier.
Israel was “attempting to control the town” as it was “a strategic gateway for a rapid ground incursion,” the NNA said.
It said Israeli troops had dynamited houses and were “trying to surround (Khiam) from all sides using extensive air and ground cover.”
Over the past two days, Hezbollah said its fighters had attacked Israeli troops about 20 times in and around the large town.
On September 23, Israel launched an intense air campaign in Lebanon, mainly targeting Hezbollah bastions in the south and east and in south Beirut.
A week later it sent ground troops across the border.
The NNA said Saturday that on the south coast, “the areas of Bayada and Wadi Hamoul are witnessing violent clashes,” and also reported air strikes and shelling.
It said Israeli troops tried to penetrate the area in order to encircle the town of Naqura via Bayada — “a strategic location” on the coast between Naqura and Tyre, 20 kilometers from the border.
Israeli tanks have been operating east of Khiam for more than three weeks, with the NNA reporting on Tuesday that the tanks had moved north of the town.
On October 29, the NNA said Israeli tanks entered Khiam’s outskirts in their deepest incursion yet into south Lebanon.
Khiam has symbolic significance. It was the site of a notorious prison run by the South Lebanon Army, an Israeli proxy militia, during its 22-year occupation of south Lebanon.
Israeli forces withdrew from the region in 2000.
The NNA also reported intense Israeli bombardment along the border, including around 70 shells pounding the town of Bint Jbeil alone.
All-out war erupted in September after nearly a year of limited cross-border exchanges of fire initiated by Hezbollah in support of Hamas, following its Palestinian ally’s October 7, 2023 attack that sparked the Gaza war.
The health ministry in Beirut says that more than 3,650 people have been killed in Lebanon since October 2023, with most deaths recorded since September this year.
Lebanon says Israeli strike on eastern town kills at least 8
- The Israeli enemy strike on Shmostar killed eight people, including four children
BEIRUT: Lebanon said eight people were killed in an Israeli strike on Saturday in the east, with state media reporting the attack on a house killed a mother and her children.
“The Israeli enemy strike on Shmostar killed eight people, including four children, and nine others were injured, including four in critical condition,” a ministry statement said, giving a preliminary toll.
The official National Nwes Agency earlier said the attack “killed a family including a mother and her four children.”
Doctor at the heart of Turkiye’s newborn baby deaths case says he was a ‘trusted’ physician
- Dr. Firat Sari is one of 47 people on trial accused of transferring newborn babies to neonatal units of private hospitals
- “Patients were referred to me because people trusted me. We did not accept patients by bribing anyone from 112,” Sari said
ISTANBUL: The Turkish doctor at the center of an alleged fraud scheme that led to the deaths of 10 babies told an Istanbul court Saturday that he was a “trusted” physician.
Dr. Firat Sari is one of 47 people on trial accused of transferring newborn babies to neonatal units of private hospitals, where they were allegedly kept for prolonged and sometimes unnecessary treatments in order to receive social security payments.
“Patients were referred to me because people trusted me. We did not accept patients by bribing anyone from 112,” Sari said, referring to Turkiye’s emergency medical phone line.
Sari, said to be the plot’s ringleader, operated the neonatal intensive care units of several private hospitals in Istanbul. He is facing a sentence of up to 583 years in prison in a case where doctors, nurses, hospital managers and other health staff are accused of putting financial gain before newborns’ wellbeing.
The case, which emerged last month, has sparked public outrage and calls for greater oversight of the health care system. Authorities have since revoked the licenses and closed 10 of the 19 hospitals that were implicated in the scandal.
“I want to tell everything so that the events can be revealed,” Sari, the owner of Medisense Health Services, told the court. “I love my profession very much. I love being a doctor very much.”
Although the defendants are charged with the negligent homicide of 10 infants since January 2023, an investigative report cited by the state-run Anadolu news agency said they caused the deaths of “hundreds” of babies over a much longer time period.
Over 350 families have petitioned prosecutors or other state institutions seeking investigations into the deaths of their children, according to state media.
Prosecutors at the trial, which opened on Monday, say the defendants also falsified reports to make the babies’ condition appear more serious so as to obtain more money from the state as well as from families.
The main defendants have denied any wrongdoing, insisting they made the best possible decisions and are now facing punishment for unavoidable, unwanted outcomes.
Sari is charged with establishing an organization with the aim of committing a crime, defrauding public institutions, forgery of official documents and homicide by negligence.
During questioning by prosecutors before the trial, Sari denied accusations that the babies were not given the proper care, that the neonatal units were understaffed or that his employees were not appropriately qualified, according to a 1,400-page indictment.
“Everything is in accordance with procedures,” he told prosecutors in a statement.
The hearings at Bakirkoy courthouse, on Istanbul’s European side, have seen protests outside calling for private hospitals to be shut down and “baby killers” to be held accountable.
The case has also led to calls for the resignation of Health Minister Kemal Memisoglu, who was the Istanbul provincial health director at the time some of the deaths occurred. Ozgur Ozel, the main opposition party leader, has called for all hospitals involved to be nationalized.
In a Saturday interview with the A Haber TV channel, Memisoglu characterized the defendants as “bad apples” who had been “weeded out.”
“Our health system is one of the best health systems in the world,” he said. “This is a very exceptional, very organized criminal organization. It is a mistake to evaluate this in the health system as a whole.”
Memisoglu also denied the claim that he shut down an investigation into the claims in 2016, when he was Istanbul’s health director, calling it “a lie and slander.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said this week that those responsible for the deaths would be severely punished but warned against placing all the blame on the country’s health care system.
“We will not allow our health care community to be battered because of a few rotten apples,” he said.
