GAZA: Israel bombarded northern Gaza overnight in some of the heaviest shelling in weeks, causing panic among residents and flattening neighborhoods in an area from which the Israeli army had previously down its troops, residents said on Tuesday.
Army tanks made a new incursion east of Beit Hanoun on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip, though they did not penetrate far into the city, residents and Hamas media said. Gunfire reached some schools where displaced residents were sheltering.
In Israel, where government offices and businesses were shut to celebrate the Jewish Passover holiday, incoming rocket alerts sounded in southern border towns, although no casualties were reported.
The armed wing of Islamic Jihad, a group allied to Hamas, claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks on Sderot and Nir Am, indicating fighters were still able to launch them almost 200 days into the war, which has flattened large swathes of the enclave and displaced almost all of its 2.3 million people.
Thick black smoke could be seen rising in northern Gaza from across the southern Israeli border. Shelling was intense east of Beit Hanoun and Jabalia and continued on Tuesday morning in areas such as Zeitoun, one of Gaza City’s oldest suburbs, with residents reporting at least 10 strikes in a matter of seconds along the main road.
Just west of Beit Hanoun in Beit Lahiya, medics and Hamas media said strikes had hit a mosque and a crowd gathering on the coastal road to collect aid dropped from the air. Reuters could not immediately confirm those targets.
“It was one of those nights of horror that we had lived in at the start of the war. The bombing from tanks and planes didn’t stop,” said Um Mohammad, 53, a mother-of-six living 700 meters from Zeitoun.
“I had to gather with my children and my sisters who came to shelter with me in one place and pray for our lives as the house kept shaking,” she told Reuters via a chat app.
“I don’t know if we will make it alive before this war stops,” she added.
The Israeli army said rockets launched overnight into Israel had come from firing positions in northern Gaza. It had struck rocket launchers and killed several militants overnight, in what it called “targeted and precise” strikes.
“Over the past day, IAF fighter jets and additional aircraft struck approximately 25 terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip, including military infrastructure, observation posts, terrorists, launch posts,” it said in a statement.
Hitting areas where troops had withdrawn
The renewed shelling and bombing of northern Gaza comes almost four months after the Israeli army announced it was drawing down its troops there, saying Hamas no longer controlled those areas.
This month, Israel also drew down most of its forces in southern Gaza. But efforts to reach a ceasefire have failed, and Israeli bombardment and raids on territory where its troops have withdrawn are making it difficult for displaced Gazans to return to abandoned homes. Israel also struck Khan Younis in the south on Tuesday, a day after tanks raided eastern parts of that city.
Israel says it is seeking to eradicate Hamas, which controls the enclave, following an attack by the militant group on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 and taking 253 hostages by Israeli tallies.
Across the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military strikes killed 32 Palestinians and wounded 59 others in the past 24 hours, Palestinian health authorities said. They say more than 34,000 people have been confirmed killed in the seven-month war, with thousands more bodies as yet unrecovered.
Residents also reported bombing east of Deir Al-Balah on Tuesday in a central zone separating the north from the south.
In Nasser Hospital, southern Gaza’s main health facility, authorities recovered a further 35 bodies from what they say is one of at least three mass graves found at the site, taking the total found there to 310 in one week.
Israel says it was forced to battle inside hospitals because Hamas fighters operated there, which medical staff and Hamas deny.
Israel military strikes northern Gaza in heaviest shelling in weeks
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Israel military strikes northern Gaza in heaviest shelling in weeks
- Army tanks made a new incursion east of Beit Hanoun on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip, though they did not penetrate far into the city
- The renewed shelling and bombing of northern Gaza comes almost four months after the Israeli army announced it was drawing down its troops there
US hits Israeli settler group with sanctions over West Bank violence
- Sanctions block Americans from any transactions with Amana and freeze its US-held assets
- Settler violence had been on the rise prior to the eruption of the Gaza war, and has worsened since the conflict began
The Amana settler group “a key part of the Israeli extremist settlement movement and maintains ties to various persons previously sanctioned by the US government and its partners for perpetrating violence in the West Bank,” the Treasury Department said in a statement announcing the sanctions.
The sanctions also target a subsidiary of Amana called Binyanei Bar Amana, described by Treasury as a company that builds and sell homes in Israeli settlements and settler outposts.
The sanctions block Americans from any transactions with Amana and freeze its US-held assets. The United Kingdom and Canada have also imposed sanctions on Amana.
Israel has settled the West Bank since capturing it during the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians say the settlements have undermined the prospects for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Israel views the West Bank as the biblical Judea and Samaria, and the settlers cite biblical ties to the land.
Settler violence had been on the rise prior to the eruption of the Gaza war, and has worsened since the conflict began over a year ago.
Most countries deem the settlements illegal under international law, a position disputed by Israel which sees the territory as a security bulwark. In 2019, the then-Trump administration abandoned the long-held US position that the settlements are illegal before it was restored by President Joe Biden.
Last week, nearly 90 US lawmakers urged Biden to impose sanctions on members of members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over anti-Palestinian violence in the West Bank.
Around 100 projectiles fired from Lebanon into Israel: army
- Israel’s first responders said two people, including a 65-year-old woman with a shrapnel wound to the neck, sustained light injuries in northern Israel
JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said Hezbollah fired around 100 projectiles from Lebanon into northern Israel on Monday, with the country’s air defense system intercepting some of them.
Israel’s first responders said two people, including a 65-year-old woman with a shrapnel wound to the neck, sustained light injuries in northern Israel and were taken to hospital.
The military said in a first statement that “as of 15:00 (1300 GMT), approximately 60 projectiles that were fired by the Hezbollah terrorist organization have crossed from Lebanon into Israel today.”
Later it said, “following the sirens that sounded between 15:09 and 15:11 in the Western Galilee area, approximately 40 projectiles were identified crossing from Lebanon into Israeli territory.”
Israel has escalated its bombing of targets in Lebanon since September 23 and has since sent in ground troops, following almost a year of limited, cross-border exchanges of fire begun by the Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in support of Hamas in Gaza.
‘No plan B’ to aid Palestinian refugees: UNRWA chief
- Israel ordered ban on organization that coordinates nearly all aid in war-ravaged Gaza
- UNRWA provides assistance to nearly six million Palestinian refugees
GENEVA: There is no alternative to the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, its chief said Monday, following Israel’s order to ban the organization that coordinates nearly all aid in war-ravaged Gaza.
“There is no plan B,” the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, told reporters in Geneva.
Within the UN “there is no other agency geared to provide the same activities,” providing not only aid in Gaza but also primary health care and education to hundreds of thousands of children, he said.
He has called on the UN, which created UNRWA in 1949, to prevent the implementation of a ban on the organization in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, which was approved by the Israeli parliament last month.
The ban, which is due to take effect in January, sparked global condemnation, including from key Israeli backer the United States.
UNRWA provides assistance to nearly six million Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
Israel has long been critical of the agency, but tensions escalated after Israel in January accused about a dozen of its staff of taking part in Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
A series of probes found some “neutrality related issues” at UNRWA and determined that nine of the agency’s roughly 13,000 employees in Gaza “may have been involved” in the attack, but found no evidence for Israel’s central allegations.
Lazzarini was in Geneva for a meeting of UNRWA’s advisory commission to discuss the way forward at the organization’s “darkest moment.”
“The clock is ticking fast,” he told the commission, according to a transcript.
Describing Gaza as “an unrelenting dystopian horror,” he warned that “what hangs in the balance, is the fate of millions of Palestine refugees and the legitimacy of the rules-based international order that has been in place since the end of the Second World War.”
Anton Leis, head of Spain’s international cooperation and development agency and chair of the advisory committee, told reporters that there was “simply no alternative to UNRWA,” which he said had seen more than 240 staff members killed in Gaza since the start of the war.
“It is the only organization that possesses the staff, the infrastructure and the capacity to deliver lifesaving assistance to Palestinian refugees at the scale needed, especially in Gaza,” he said.
Lazzarini agreed, saying that “If you are talking about bringing in a truck with food, you will surely find an alternative,” but “the answer is no” when it comes to education and primary health care.
Lazzarini warned that a halt to UNRWA’s activities in Israel and East Jerusalem would block it from coordinating massive aid efforts inside Gaza.
“This would mean we could not operate in Gaza,” he said, adding that it would not be possible to coordinate the deconfliction with Israeli authorities to ensure aid convoys can move safely.
“The environment would be much too dangerous,” he said.
The UNRWA chief has charged that Israel’s main objective in its attacks on the agency is to strip Palestinians of their refugee status, undermining efforts toward a two-state solution.
“We have to be clear, even if UNRWA today would cease its operation, the statue of refugee would remain,” he said.
Without the agency, he said, the responsibility for providing services to the Palestinian refugees “will come back to the occupying power, being Israel.”
If no one steps in to fill the void, he said, it “will create a vacuum ... (and) sow the seeds for more extremism, more hate in the future.”
He called on the international community to go beyond statements of condemnation and put far more pressure on Israel.
“We feel alone.”
‘Jordan stands firm against Israeli aggression on Gaza,’ King Abdullah says as he opens parliament
- Addressing lawmakers, King Abdullah said Jordan was working tirelessly through Arab and international efforts to stop the war
RIYADH: Jordan stands firm against the “aggression on Gaza and Israeli violations in the West Bank,” the country’s King Abdullah said on Monday as he opened a newly elected parliament.
Addressing lawmakers, he said Jordan was working tirelessly through Arab and international efforts to stop the war.
“Jordan has exerted tremendous efforts, and Jordanians have valiantly been treating the wounded in the direst of circumstances. Jordanians were the first to deliver aid by air and land to people in Gaza, and we will remain by their side, now and in the future,” he said.
In his speech, the king told newly elected parliamentarians at the start of their four-year term that the current parliament was “the first step in the implementation of the political modernization project, on a track to bolster the role of platform-based parties and the participation of women and young people.”
“This requires parliamentary performance, collective action, and close cooperation between the government and parliament, in accordance with the constitution,” the king was reported as saying by Jordan News Agency.
King Abdullah said the government aimed to provide Jordanians with a decent life and empower youths while equipping them for the jobs of the future.
“We must continue implementing the Economic Modernisation Vision to unleash the potential of the national economy and increase growth rates over the next decade, capitalising on Jordan’s human competencies and international relations as catalysts for growth,” the king said.
Large Gaza food convoy violently looted, UNRWA says
- UN aid official said last week Gaza aid access had reached low point
GAZA: A convoy of 109 trucks was violently looted on Nov. 16 after entering Gaza, resulting in the loss of 98 trucks in what aid workers say is one of the worst such incidents in the more than 13-month-old war, an UNRWA aid official told Reuters on Monday.
The convoy carrying food provided by UN agencies UNRWA and the World Food Programme was instructed by Israel to depart at short notice via an unfamiliar route from Kerem Shalom crossing, Louise Wateridge, UNRWA Senior Emergency Officer told Reuters.
“This incident highlights the severity of access challenges of bringing aid into southern and central Gaza,” she said, adding that injuries occurred in the incident.
“The urgency of the crisis cannot be overstated; without immediate intervention, severe food shortages are set to worsen, further endangering the lives of over two million people who depend on humanitarian aid to survive,” she said.
WFP and COGAT, the Israeli military agency that deals with Palestinian civilian affairs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The agency says it does all it can to ensure that enough aid enters the coastal enclave, and that Israel does not prevent the entry of humanitarian aid.
A UN aid official said on Friday that Gaza aid access had reached a low point, with deliveries to parts of the besieged north of the enclave all but impossible.
