GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: Israel launched air strikes Thursday on southern Gaza’s Rafah after threatening to send troops into the city, where around 1.4 million Palestinians have sought shelter from around the territory.
Global powers trying to navigate a way to end the Israel-Hamas war have so far come up short, but a US envoy was expected in Israel on Thursday to try to secure a truce deal.
International concern has spiraled over the high civilian death toll and dire humanitarian crisis in the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel.
More than four months of relentless fighting and air strikes have flattened much of the Hamas-run coastal territory, pushing its population of around 2.4 million to the brink of famine, according to the UN.
International concern has in recent weeks centered on Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, where more than 1.4 million people forced to flee their homes elsewhere in the territory are now living in crowded shelters and makeshift tents.
The last city untouched by Israeli ground troops, Rafah also serves as the main entry point via neighboring Egypt for desperately needed relief supplies.
Israel has warned it will expand its ground operations into Rafah if Hamas does not free the remaining hostages held in Gaza by next month’s start of the Muslim holy month Ramadan.
The war started when Hamas launched its attack on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of about 1,160 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Hamas militants also took about 250 hostages — 130 of whom remain in Gaza, including 30 presumed dead, according to Israel.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 29,313 people, mostly women and children, according to the latest count by the Hamas-run health ministry in the territory.
War cabinet member Benny Gantz said Israel’s operation in Rafah would begin “after the evacuation of the population,” although his government has not offered any details on where civilians would be evacuated to.
In the early hours of Thursday, AFP reporters heard multiple air strikes on Rafah, particularly in the Al-Shaboura neighborhood.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said early Thursday that 99 people had been killed around Gaza during the night, most of them women, children and elderly people.
Abdel Rahman Mohamed Jumaa said he lost his family in recent strikes on Rafah.
“I found my wife lying in the street,” he said. “Then I saw a man carrying a girl and I ran toward him and.... picked her up, realizing she was really my daughter.”
He was holding a small shrouded corpse in his arms.
Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, was expected to arrive in Israel Thursday — his second stop in the region after Egypt as part of US efforts to advance a hostage deal and broker a truce.
Hamas’s chief Ismail Haniyeh was in Cairo for talks as well, according to the group.
Israel’s Gantz said there were efforts to “promote a new plan for the return of the hostages.”
“We are seeing the first signs that indicate the possibility of progress in this direction.”
Matthew Miller, US State Department spokesman, said Washington was hoping for an “agreement that secures a temporary ceasefire where we can get the hostages out and get humanitarian assistance,” but declined to give details on ongoing negotiations.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted the army will keep fighting until it has destroyed Hamas and freed the remaining hostages.
Israel’s parliament on Wednesday overwhelmingly backed a proposal by Netanyahu to oppose any unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state.
The vote came days after the Washington Post reported that US President Joe Biden’s administration and a small group of Arab nations were working out a comprehensive plan for long-term peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
It included a firm timeline for the establishment of a Palestinian state, the report said.
Separately, a report by an Israeli group that fights sexual violence said Hamas’s October 7 attack also involved systematic sexual assaults on civilians, based on witness testimonies, public and classified information, and interviews.
The report came the same week UN rights experts called for an independent probe into alleged Israeli abuses against Palestinian women and girls — which Israel rejected as “despicable and unfounded claims.”
Israeli officials have repeatedly alleged the militants committed violent sexual assaults during the attack — something Hamas has denied.
Combat and chaos have stalled sporadic aid deliveries for civilians in Gaza, while in Khan Yunis — a city just north of Rafah — medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said an Israeli tank had fired on a house sheltering their employees and families.
Two relatives of MSF staff were killed and six others injured, it said, condemning the strike in the “strongest possible terms.”
When contacted by AFP about the incident, the Israeli army said its forces had “fired at a building that was identified as a building where terror activity is occurring,” adding that it “regrets” harm to civilians.
In the same town, the Palestinian Red Crescent said another hospital was also hit by “artillery shelling.”
Israel has repeatedly said Hamas militants use civilian infrastructure including hospitals as operational bases — claims that Hamas has denied.
Israel strikes Gaza’s Rafah as truce talks under way
https://arab.news/ct8qv
Israel strikes Gaza’s Rafah as truce talks under way
- Global powers trying to navigate a way to end the Israel-Hamas war have so far come up short
- International concern has in recent weeks centered on Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah
Gunmen kill 10 in Alawite village in Syria: monitor
DAMASCUS: Gunmen have shot dead 10 people in an Alawite-majority village in central Syria, a war monitor said on Saturday.
“Armed men committed a massacre” on Friday that killed “10 citizens in Arza village in the northern Hama countryside that is inhabited by citizens of the Alawite sect” of ousted leader Bashar Assad, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Two Israeli hostages released, one expected later in latest Gaza exchange
- Israeli military confirms hostages are now in the custody of its forces in the Gaza Strip
- A total of three male hostages are set to be released, expected to occur in two separate locations
GAZA: Palestinian militant group Hamas handed over Israeli hostages Yarden Bibas and Ofer Kalderon on Saturday, with American-Israeli Keith Siegel expected to be transferred later in the latest stage of a truce aimed at ending the 15-month war in Gaza.
The Israeli military confirmed it had received Kalderon, a French-Israeli dual national and Bibas after the two were handed over to a Red Cross official in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.
Siegel is expected to be handed over at the Gaza City sea port later on Saturday.
Bibas is the father of the two youngest hostages, baby Kfir, only 9 months old when he was kidnapped by Hamas-led gunmen on Oct. 7, 2023, and Ariel, who was 4 at the time of the cross-border attack.
Hamas said in November 2023 that the boys and their mother Shiri, who was taken at the same time, were killed in an Israeli airstrike. There has been no word on them since.
Israel is expected to transfer 182 Palestinian prisoners and detainees, Hamas said.
Saturday is also expected to see the first Palestinians traveling from Gaza to Egypt through the newly reopened Rafah crossing. It will be opened initially for 50 injured militants and 50 wounded civilians, along with the people escorting them, with a further 100 people, most likely students, probably allowed through on humanitarian grounds.
Saturday’s handover saw none of the chaotic scenes that overshadowed an earlier transfer on Thursday, when Hamas guards struggled to shield hostages from a surging crowd in Gaza.
Kalderon and Bibas both briefly mounted a stage in Khan Younis, in front of a poster of Hamas figures including Mohammad Deif, the former military commander whose death was confirmed by Hamas this week, before being handed over to the Red Cross officials.
Seventeen hostages, including five Thais freed on Thursday, have now been released in exchange for 400 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
Negotiations are due to start by Tuesday on agreements for the release of the remaining hostages and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza in a second phase of the deal.
During the first phase of the ceasefire, 33 children, women and older male hostages as well as sick and injured, were due to be released, with more than 60 men of military age left for a second phase which must still be negotiated.
The initial six-week ceasefire, agreed with Egyptian and Qatari mediators and backed by the United States, has so far stayed on track despite a number of incidents that have led both sides to accuse the other of violating the deal.
The Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli figures.
Israel’s campaign in response has destroyed much of the densely populated Gaza Strip and killed more than 47,000 Palestinians, according to Palestinian health authorities.
Facing flak, Red Cross defends its role in Israel-Hamas war
- The Geneva-based organization had been accused of not doing enough to help hostages in Gaza or Palestinian detainees in Israel
- ICRC officials said the organization could only do so much as it is reliant on the goodwill of the belligerents
GENEVA: The Red Cross, accused of not doing enough to help hostages in Gaza or Palestinian detainees in Israel, has defended itself in a rare statement outlining the limits of its role.
Insisting on its neutrality, the International Committee of the Red Cross said the escalation of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories has triggered “a proliferation of dehumanizing language and of false and misleading information about the ICRC and our work in the current conflict.”
In recent days, ICRC vehicles have facilitated the transfer of Palestinians out of Israeli detention, and hostages held in the Gaza Strip since Hamas’s attack in Israel on October 7, 2023.
But the transfer of hostages to the ICRC has been sharply criticized following chaotic scenes on Thursday as masked fighters from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, carrying automatic weapons, struggled to hold back a surging crowd.
ICRC officials “did nothing to interfere with this intimidating display of indignity and public humiliation,” Gerald Steinberg, president of the right-wing Israeli organization NGO Monitor, wrote in the Australian-based online magazine Quillette.
The ICRC said: “Ensuring the safety and security of the handover operations is the responsibility of the parties to the agreement.”
Furthermore, “Interfering with armed security personnel could compromise the safety of ICRC staff, and more importantly that of the hostages.”
The Geneva-based organization also said it had not given permission for “people carrying Hamas flags to get on top of our buses in Ramallah” during the release of Palestinian detainees, “nor did we have the capacity to prevent people from doing so.”
In late 2023, Israel’s then foreign minister Eli Cohen said the Red Cross had “no right to exist” if it did not visit the hostages in Gaza.
However, the organization is reliant on the goodwill of the belligerents.
“From day one, we have called for the immediate release of all the hostages, and for access to them,” it says.
In World War II, the ICRC visited prisoners of war but its mandate did not explicitly extend to civilians unless governments allowed it.
The ICRC acknowledges that during World War II, it “failed to speak out and more importantly act on behalf of the millions of people who suffered and perished in the death camps, especially the Jewish people targeted, persecuted, and murdered under the Nazi regime.”
In its statement, the ICRC reaffirmed that it was the “greatest failure” in the organization’s history, and said it unequivocally rejects anti-Semitism in all its forms.
The ICRC has been accused, particularly on social media, of not putting pressure on Israel to secure visits to Palestinian detainees since October 7, 2023, and also of not doing enough to help the wounded in the Gaza Strip.
The humanitarian organization says it has been actively engaging with the Israeli authorities “to allow for the resumption of ICRC visits and family contacts for these detainees.”
As for the wounded in Gaza, the ICRC said it had received requests to evacuate hospitals in the north, but could not regularly safely access the area due the “extremely difficult security situation — together with roads blocked and unreliable communications.”
Following the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that came into effect on January 19, the ICRC, which already had 130 staff in Gaza, is deploying more personnel, including doctors.
In 1968, Leopold Boissier, a former ICRC president, noted that the criticism most frequently levelled at the organization “is the silence with which it surrounds some of its activities.”
Nearly 60 years later, the ICRC is facing similar accusations, notably since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Founded in Geneva in 1863, the organization, which has more than 18,000 staff in over 90 countries, denies being “complicit” and says it establishes trust through “confidential dialogue with all parties to the conflict.”
“Our neutrality and impartiality are critical to our ability to operate in any context.”
Egyptians protest at Rafah border crossing against Trump’s plan to displace Palestinians
- Trump said on Saturday that Egypt and Jordan should take in Palestinians from Gaza, which he called a “demolition site” following 15 months of Israeli bombardment
- Critics warned that Trump's suggestion was exactly what Israel's Zionist extremists have been trying to do, to kick out Palestinians from their homeland
CAIRO: Thousands of people demonstrated at the Rafah border crossing on Friday, an eyewitness told Reuters, in a rare state-sanctioned protest against a proposal earlier this week by US President Donald Trump for Egypt and Jordan to accept Gazan refugees.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on Wednesday rejected the idea that Egypt would facilitate the displacement of Gazans and said Egyptians would take to the streets to express their disapproval.
Protesters could be heard chanting “Long Live Egypt” and waving Egyptian and Palestinian flags.
“We say no to any displacement of Palestine or Gaza at the expense of Egypt, on the land of Sinai,” said Sinai resident Gazy Saeed.
Trump said on Saturday that Egypt and Jordan should take in Palestinians from Gaza, which he called a “demolition site” following 15 months of Israeli bombardment that rendered most of its 2.3 million people homeless.
On Thursday, Trump forcefully reiterated the idea, saying “We do a lot for them, and they are going to do it,” in apparent reference to abundant US aid, including military assistance, to both Egypt and Jordan.
Any suggestion that Palestinians leave Gaza — territory they hope will become part of an independent state — has been anathema to the Palestinian leadership for generations and repeatedly rejected by neighboring Arab states since the Gaza war began in October 2023.
Jordan is already home to several million Palestinians, while tens of thousands live in Egypt.
Egypt’s president El-Sisi congratulates Syria’s new president Sharaa, statement says
CAIRO: Egypt President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi congratulated Syria’s new President Ahmed Al-Sharaa, who was appointed on Wednesday by armed factions, and wished him success in achieving the Syrian people’s aspirations, El-Sisi said in a statement on Friday.
Sharaa, an Islamist who was once an affiliate of Al-Qaeda, has been trying to gain support from Arab and Western leaders since he led a rebel offensive that toppled former Syrian President Bashar Assad last year.
