GAZA: Israel pounded Gaza on Friday, nearly 12 weeks into the war started by the October 7 attacks, as Egypt hosted a Hamas delegation for talks aimed at ending the conflict that has devastated much of the besieged Palestinian territory.
With vast areas of northern Gaza in ruins and largely deserted, Israeli air strikes and ground combat have focussed on central and southern districts, driving ever more displaced families into crowded areas around Rafah near the Egyptian border.
Intense fighting around central Deir Al-Balah and the biggest southern city, Khan Yunis, has driven about 100,000 newly displaced people into already-overcrowded Rafah, said the UN humanitarian office, even as targets there were bombed too.
Rafah residents combed through rubble for survivors and bodies after a deadly air strike Thursday.
One local man, Tayseer Abu Al-Eish, said he was at home when “we heard a loud explosion and debris started falling on us. My daughters were screaming.”
The relentless bombardment has caused mass civilian casualties and sparked global calls for a cease-fire as alarm has mounted over the dire fate of Palestinians enduring hunger and sleeping in makeshift shelters in the cold winter months.
After another strike, in Deir Al-Balah, one bereaved mother, Suhair Nasser, wept as she cradled the bodies of her twin children, exclaiming that “the house was bombed and the debris fell on the kids on December 28, their birthday.”
The military said it had “eliminated dozens of terrorists” across Gaza over the past 24 hours and was “extending operations in Khan Yunis,” the hometown of Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar.
Gunmen of Hamas, considered a “terrorist” group by the United States and European Union, launched an attack on October 7 that left about 1,140 people dead, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
The Palestinian militants also took about 250 people hostage, more than half of whom remain captive inside the war zone, some of them believed dead.
Israel’s relentless military campaign since then has killed at least 21,507 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza.
Israel’s army says 168 soldiers have been killed inside Gaza.
Hamas’s military wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said Friday it had launched a fresh barrage of rockets at southern Israel.
An Israeli siege imposed after October 7, following years of crippling blockade, has deprived Gaza’s 2.4 million people of food, water, fuel and medicine.
The UN says more than 80 percent of Gaza’s population has been driven from their homes, with many now living in cramped shelters or tents around Rafah.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said 308 people seeking shelter in their facilities have been killed.
UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths bemoaned “an impossible situation for the people of Gaza, and for those trying to help them.”
“You think getting aid into Gaza is easy? Think again,” he wrote Friday on X, formerly Twitter.
A UN aid convoy came under fire by the Israeli military without causing casualties, UNRWA said.
The severe shortages have been only sporadically eased by humanitarian aid convoys entering primarily via Egypt.
A truckload of fresh food, including meat, eggs and fruit, reached a Rafah market Friday, bringing some relief.
“This is the first time eggs and some types of fruit have entered Gaza from Egypt,” said vendor Muntasser Al-Shaer.
“All types of fruit are missing in the markets. There are some types of vegetables but they’re really expensive.”
While Israel has repeatedly vowed to destroy Hamas, Cairo has proposed a plan involving renewable cease-fires, a staggered release of hostages for Palestinian prisoners and ultimately an end to the war, say sources close to Hamas.
Speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, a Hamas official said the delegation would “give the response of the Palestinian factions, including several observations” regarding the proposal Egypt recently submitted to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Hamas would seek “guarantees for a complete Israeli military withdrawal” from Gaza, the official said.
Looking at post-war Gaza, the proposal provides for a Palestinian government of technocrats after talks involving “all Palestinian factions,” which would be responsible for governing and rebuilding the territory.
Israel is yet to formal comment on the Cairo plan but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told families of hostages on Thursday that “we are in contact” with the Egyptian mediators and promised that “we are working to bring them all back.”
Egypt’s State Information Services chief Dia Rashwan said the plan was “intended to bring together the views of all parties concerned, with the aim of ending the shedding of Palestinian blood.”
In Tel Aviv, hundreds rallied on Thursday calling for a cease-fire.
“Israelis, Palestinians, Muslims, Jews, Christians — this is everybody’s home,” said one demonstrator, teacher Itay Eyal, 51, who stressed that all sides are entitled to “life, freedom, sovereignty and dignity.”
He said “the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 will never be pardoned and excused” but added that “if you don’t see the historical context, then you’re condemned to repeat the same tragedy over and over again.”
Tensions have also flared in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian motorist who had wounded four people in an alleged car ramming attack.
The Gaza war has also seen violence flare elsewhere across the Middle East, where Israel has long waged a shadow war with its arch foe Iran and armed groups allied with Tehran.
Israeli forces have traded heavy cross-border fire with Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah since the Gaza war erupted.
On Friday the army said it struck “Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon” after rocket fire from there.
A US warship shot down a drone and an anti-ship ballistic missile fired Thursday by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia, the US military said.
The Houthis have repeatedly targeted vessels in the vital Red Sea shipping lane with strikes they say are in support of Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel bombs Gaza as Egypt hosts Hamas to discuss truce proposal
https://arab.news/27u2t
Israel bombs Gaza as Egypt hosts Hamas to discuss truce proposal
- Palestinians stream into southern Gaza town as Israel expands its offensive in center
- Military said it had “eliminated dozens of terrorists” across Gaza over past 24 hours
Aid only ‘delaying deaths’ as Sudan counts down to famine: agency chief
- “We have the biggest humanitarian crisis on the planet in Sudan, the biggest hunger crisis, the biggest displacement crisis,” Norwegian Refugee Council chief Jan Egeland said
- “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.
