KHAN YOUNIS: As Gaza braces for a cold, wet winter, displaced Palestinians living in tents and makeshift shelters by the sea are sewing clothes from blankets in a desperate effort to stay warm.
Nidaa Attia, 31, and others measure, cut and sew the clothing in a tent near the beach at Al-Mawasi in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
The work is entirely manual and labor intensive. Lacking electricity, they generate power by using the pedals of a bicycle connected by a belt to their sewing machine.
“Winter is coming for the second time (since the start of the war) and people are without any (warm) clothes,” Attia said.
Nearby a young child stood on a table while another woman measured him for a jumper to protect him from the cold winter.
“There are no clothes coming into the Gaza Strip, so we thought a lot about how we could find a solution to the lack of fabrics, and we came up with the idea of recycling thermal blankets into winter clothes,” Attia said.
Her “Needle and Thread” initiative, launched in September, relies mostly on volunteers, though some receive a small payment. The clothes are sold for between 70 and 120 shekels ($18-$30) but prices are lower for those who bring blankets.
A Gazan winter can be harsh, marked by cold temperatures and strong winds. Last year heavy rains flooded some shelters.
After more than a year of war, many in Gaza have no income. Some have tried to sell their possessions, including second-hand clothes, but few can afford the prices of even basic goods.
The amount of international aid entering Gaza has plummeted to its lowest level all year, according to UN data, while a global hunger monitor has also warned of a looming famine.
Displaced
Most of the roughly two million people in Gaza have been displaced by Israel’s relentless assault on the coastal strip.
“We have been displaced for more than a year now. We lived through one winter and now winter is coming again,” said Samira Tamous, who is originally from Gaza City in the north of the Strip but now lives in a makeshift shelter in Al-Mawasi.
“There are no winter clothes at all, not in the market and not to dress my daughter,” said Tamous, whose 13-year-old child with Down syndrome was putting on clothing made under the “Needle and Thread” project.
The Israeli offensive in Gaza was triggered by an attack led by Hamas militants on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken as hostages back into the Palestinian enclave, according to Israeli officials.
The overall death toll in Gaza is approaching 43,000, according to the enclave’s health ministry.
Displaced Gazans sew winter clothes from blankets
https://arab.news/46h3d
Displaced Gazans sew winter clothes from blankets
- The amount of international aid entering Gaza has plummeted to its lowest level all year
- The overall death toll in Gaza is approaching 43,000, according to the enclave’s health ministry.
Israeli campaign leaves Lebanese border towns in ruins, satellite images show
- Images reveal wide destruction in hilltop villages, towns
- White splotches replace neighbourhoods, year-ago contrast shows
BEIRUT: Israel's military campaign in southern Lebanon has caused vast destruction in more than a dozen border towns and villages, reducing many of them to clusters of grey craters, according to satellite imagery provided to Reuters by Planet Labs Inc.
Many of the towns, emptied of their residents by the bombing, had been inhabited for at least two centuries. The imagery reviewed includes towns between Kfarkela in southeastern Lebanon, south past Meiss al-Jabal, and then west past a base used by U.N. peacekeepers to the small village of Labbouneh.
"There are beautiful old homes, hundreds of years old. Thousands of artillery shells have hit the town, hundreds of air strikes," said Abdulmonem Choukeir, mayor of Meiss al-Jabal, one of the villages hit by Israeli attacks.
"Who knows what will still be standing at the end?"
Reuters compared satellite images taken in October 2023 to those taken in September and October 2024. Many of the villages with striking visible damage over the course of the last month sit atop hills overlooking Israel.
After nearly a year of exchanging fire across the border, Israel intensified its strikes on southern Lebanon and beyond over the last month. Israeli troops have made ground incursions all along the mountainous frontier with Lebanon, engaging in heavy clashes with Hezbollah fighters inside some towns.
Lebanon's disaster risk management unit, which tracks both victims and attacks on specific towns, said the 14 towns reviewed by Reuters had been subject to a total of 3,809 attacks by Israel over the last year.
Israel's military did not immediately respond to Reuters questions about the scale of destruction. Israel's military spokesman Daniel Hagari said on Oct. 24 that Israel has struck more than 3,200 targets in south Lebanon.
The military says it is attacking towns in southern Lebanon because Hezbollah has turned "civilian villages into fortified combat zones," hiding weapons, explosives and vehicles there. Hezbollah denies using civilian infrastructure to launch attacks or store weapons, and residents of the towns deny the assertion.
A person familiar with Israel's military operations in Lebanon told Reuters that troops were systematically attacking towns with strategic overlook points, including Mhaibib.
The person said that Israel had "learned lessons" after its last war with Hezbollah in 2006, including incidents in which troops making ground incursions into the valleys of southern Lebanon were attacked by Hezbollah fighters on hilltops.
"That is why they are targeting these villages so heavily - so they can move more freely," the person said.
The most recent images of Kfarkela showed a string of white splotches along a main road leading into a town. Imagery taken last year showed the same road lined with houses and green vegetation, indicating the houses had been pulverized.
Further south, Meiss al-Jabal, a town 700 meters (yards) away from the U.N.-demarcated Blue Line separating Israeli and Lebanese territory, suffered significant destruction to an entire block near the town centre.
The area, measuring approximately 150 meters by 400 metres, appeared as a swatch of sandy brown, signalling the buildings there had been entirely flattened. Images from the same month in 2023 showed a densely packed neighbourhood of homes.
'Any sign of life'
At least 1.2 million people have been displaced by Israel's strikes and more than 2,600 have been killed over the last year - a vast majority in the last month, Lebanon's government says.
Residents of the border villages have not been able to reach their hometowns in months. "After war came to Meiss al-Jabal, after the residents left, we no longer know anything about the state of the village," Meiss al-Jabal's mayor said.
Imagery of the nearby village of Mhaibib depicted similar levels of destruction. Mhaibib is one of several villages - alongside Kfarkela, Aitaroun, Odaisseh, and Ramyeh - featured in footage shared on social media showing simultaneous explosions of several structures at once, indicating they had been laden with explosives.
Israel's military spokesman said on Oct. 24 that a command centre for Hezbollah's elite Radwan unit lay under Mhaibib, and that Israeli troops had "neutralised the main tunnel network" used by the group, but did not give details.
Hagari has said that Israel's goal is to "push Hezbollah away from the border, dismantle its capabilities, and eliminate the threat to northern residents" of Israel.
"This is a plan you take off the shelf," said Jon Alterman, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. "Militaries plan, and they're executing the plan."
Seth Jones, another senior vice president at CSIS, had earlier told Reuters that Hezbollah used frontline villages to fire its shorter-range rockets into Israel.
Lubnan Baalbaki, the conductor of Lebanon's philharmonic orchestra and son of late Lebanese artist Abdel-Hamid Baalbaki, said his family had been purchasing satellite imagery of their hometown of Odaisseh to check if the family house still stood.
The house had been transformed by Abdel-Hamid into a cultural centre, full of his art works, original sketches and more than 1,000 books in an all-wood library. Abdel-Hamid passed away in 2013 and was buried behind the house with his late wife.
"We're a family of artists, my father is well-known, and our home was a known cultural home. We were trying to reassure ourselves with that thought," Baalbaki, the son, told Reuters.
Until late October, the house still stood. But at the weekend Baalbaki saw a video circulating of several homes in Odaisseh, including his family's, exploding.
The family is not affiliated to Hezbollah and Baalbaki denied that any weapons or military equipment were stored there.
"If you have such high-level intelligence that you can target specific military figures, then you know what's in that house," Baalbaki said. "It was an art house. We are all artists. The aim is to erase any sign of life."
Palestinians say 100,000 residents trapped in Israel’s north Gaza assault
- Israeli forces say they captured 100 militants inside hospital in operations to root out regrouping Hamas fighters
- Palestinian emergency service says around 100,000 residents marooned without medical, food or fuel stocks
CAIRO: Israeli tanks thrust deeper on Monday into two north Gaza towns and a historic refugee camp, trapping around 100,000 civilians, the Palestinian emergency service said, in what the military said were operations to root out regrouping Hamas militants.
The Israeli military said soldiers captured around 100 suspected Hamas militants in a raid into Kamal Adwan hospital in the Jabalia camp. Hamas and medics have denied any militant presence at the hospital.
The Gaza Strip’s health ministry said at least 19 people were killed by Israeli airstrikes and bombardment on Monday, 13 of them in the north of the shattered coastal territory.
The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said around 100,000 people were marooned in Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun without medical or food supplies. Reuters could not verify the number independently.
The emergency service said its operations had ground to a halt because of the three-week-long Israeli assault back into the north, an area where the military said it had wiped out viable Hamas combat forces earlier in the year-long war.
As talks led by the US, Egypt and Qatar to broker a ceasefire resumed on Sunday after multiple abortive attempts, Egypt’s president proposed an initial two-day truce to exchange four Israeli hostages of Hamas for some Palestinian prisoners, to be followed by talks within 10 days on a permanent ceasefire.
There was no public comment from Israel or Hamas, who have stuck to irreconcilable conditions for ending the war.
Gaza’s war has kindled wider Middle East conflict, raising fears of global instability, with Israeli forces invading south Lebanon to stop Hezbollah rocketing northern Israel in support of fellow Iran-backed militant group Hamas in Gaza.
It has also triggered rare direct clashes between Middle East arch-foes Israel and Iran. At the weekend, Israeli warplanes pounded missiles sites in Iran in retaliation for an Oct. 1 Iranian missile volley at Israel.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday Tehran would
“use all available tools“
to respond to Israel’s weekend attack.
Israeli raid into north Gaza hospital
North Gaza’s three hospitals, where officials refused orders by the Israeli army to evacuate, said they were hardly operating. At least two had been damaged by Israeli fire during the assault and run out of medical, food and fuel stocks.
At least one doctor, a nurse and two child patients had died in those hospitals due to a lack of treatment in the past week.
On Monday, the Gaza health ministry said there was only one of roughly 70 medical staff — a paediatrician — was left at Kamal Adwan Hospital after Israel “detained and expelled” the others.
The Israeli military said soldiers who raided the hospital “apprehended approximately 100 terrorists from the compound, including terrorists who attempted to escape during the evacuation of civilians. Inside the hospital, they found weapons, terror funds, and intelligence documents.”
North Gaza residents said Israeli forces were besieging schools and other shelters housing displaced families, ordering them out before rounding up men and ushering women and children out of the area toward Gaza City and the south.
’Nonsense talk of ceasefire’
Only a few families headed to southern Gaza as the majority preferred to relocate temporarily in Gaza City, fearing they could otherwise never regain access to their homes.
Some said they had written their death notices in case they died from the constant bombardment, saying they would prefer death to displacement.
“While the world is busy with Lebanon and new nonsense talk about a few days of ceasefire (in Gaza), the Israeli occupation is wiping out north Gaza and displacing its people,” a resident of Jabalia told Reuters by a chat app.
“(But) neither (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu nor Eiland will be able to take us out of northern Gaza.”
Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, was the lead author of a much-debated proposal dubbed “the generals’ plan” that would see Israel rapidly clear northern Gaza of civilians before starving out surviving Hamas fighters by cutting off their water and food supplies.
This month’s Israeli tank assault drew Palestinian accusations that the military has embraced Eiland’s concept, which he envisaged as a short-term step to defeat Hamas in the north but which Palestinians fear is meant to clear the area for good to carve out a buffer zone for the military after the war.
The Israeli military has denied pursuing any such plan. It says its forces operate in keeping with international law and that it targets militants who hide among the civilian population which they use as human shields, a charge Hamas denies.
North Gaza was the first part of the enclave to be hammered by Israel’s ground offensive into the territory after Hamas’ cross-border attack on Oct. 7, 2023, with intensive bombing largely flattening towns like Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya.
Nevertheless, Hamas-led militants continue to attack Israeli forces in hit-and-run operations with anti-tank rockets, mortar salvoes and bombs planted in buildings, streets and other areas where they anticipate Israeli forces taking up positions.
The war erupted after Hamas fighters stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7 last year, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, by Israeli tallies.
The death toll from Israel’s retaliatory air and ground onslaught in Gaza has reached 43,020, the Gaza health ministry said in an update on Monday, with the densely populated enclave widely reduced to rubble.
Middle East aid workers say rules of war being flouted
Geneva: Flagrant violations of the laws of war in the escalating conflict in the Middle East are setting a dangerous precedent, aid workers in the region warn.
Since Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack on Israel from Gaza last year, humanitarians say the warring parties are flouting international humanitarian law (IHL).
“The rules of war are being broken in such a flagrant way... (it) is setting a precedent that we have not seen in any other conflict,” Marwan Jilani, the vice president of the Palestine Red Crescent (PCRS), told AFP.
Speaking last week during a meeting in Geneva of the 191 national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, he lamented a “total disregard for human life (and) for international humanitarian law.”
Amid Israel’s devastating retaliatory operation in the Gaza Strip, local aid workers are striving to deliver assistance while facing the same risks as the rest of the population, he said.
The PCRS has more than 900 staff and several thousand volunteers inside Gaza, where more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-ruled territory’s health ministry, and where the UN says virtually the entire population has been repeatedly displaced.
“They’re part of the community,” said Jilani. “I think every single member of our staff has lost family members.”
He decried especially what he said was a “deliberate targeting of the health sector.”
Israel rejects such accusations and maintains that it is carrying out its military operations in both Gaza and Lebanon in accordance with international law.
But Jilani said that “many of our staff, including doctors and nurses... were detained, were taken for weeks (and) were tortured.”
Since the war began, 34 PRCS staff and volunteers have been killed in Gaza, and another two in the West Bank, “most of them while serving,” he said.
Four other staff members are still being held, their whereabouts and condition unknown.
Jilani warned that the disregard for basic international law in the expanding conflict was eroding the belief that such laws even exist.
A “huge casualty of this war,” he said, “is the belief within the Middle East that there is no international law.”
Uri Shacham, chief of staff at the Israeli’s emergency aid organization Magen David Adom (MDA), also decried the total disregard for laws requiring the protection of humanitarians.
During Hamas’s October 7 attack, which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures, MDA staff and volunteers rushing to the scene to help were also killed, he said.
It lost seven people that day.
Shacham said they were killed “while they were treating others, while they were identified as humanitarians.
“This was so unbelievable for us,” he said, warning of potentially dangerous ripple effects.
“Our biggest concern is that once the barrier was broken, then this might be something that others would do,” he cautioned.
The Red Cross in Lebanon, where for the past month Israel has been launching ground operations and dramatically escalating its air strikes against Hezbollah, also condemned the slide.
Thirteen of its volunteers have been recently injured on ambulance missions.
One of its top officials, Samar Abou Jaoudeh, told AFP that they did not appear to have been targeted directly.
“But nevertheless, not being able to reach the injured people, and (missiles) hitting right in front of an ambulance is also not respecting IHL,” she said, stressing the urgent need to ensure more respect for international law on the ground.
Abou Jaoudeh feared Lebanon, where at least 1,620 people have been killed since September 23, according to an AFP tally based on official figures, could suffer the same fate as Gaza.
“We hope that no country would face anything that Gaza is facing now, but unfortunately a bit of that scenario is beginning to be similar in Lebanon,” she said.
The Lebanese Red Cross, she said, was preparing “for all scenarios... but we just hope that it wouldn’t reach this point.”
Israeli troops capture around 100 Hamas militants in north Gaza hospital, military says
- Gaza health officials have denied any militant presence at the hospital
- Medical staffers refused to evacuate the hospital or leave their patients unattended
JERUSALEM: Israeli soldiers captured around 100 suspected Hamas militants during a raid in Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, the military said on Monday.
Gaza health officials and Hamas have denied any militant presence at the hospital, which Israeli forces stormed on Friday and left on Saturday.
“The soldiers apprehended approximately 100 terrorists from the compound, including terrorists who attempted to escape during the evacuation of civilians. Inside the hospital, they found weapons, terror funds, and intelligence documents,” the military said.
Gaza’s health ministry said the troops had detained dozens of male medical staffers and damaged the hospital, which had already been struggling to operate with heavy Israeli raids in the area.
“A few of the fully identified terrorists disguised themselves as medical staff so we didn’t have any alternative but to check the medical staff as well,” a military official told journalists in an online briefing.
Footage circulated by Gaza’s health ministry on Saturday — which Reuters could not immediately verify — showed damage to several buildings after the Israeli forces withdrew.
The military official said that troops had caused limited damage to the hospital when entering it and that soldiers also had to destroy what he described as “dual use” equipment, like oxygen tanks, which if detonated could have harmed anyone at the complex.
Medical staffers refused to evacuate the hospital or leave their patients unattended. Hundreds of displaced Palestinians had also been sheltering there.
“They evacuated all those who were sheltering here...They separated men from women and made two queues, it was very humiliating for our men since they took them without clothes and nothing to cover with,” said Mayssoun Alian, a hospital nurse.
The military official said that suspected Hamas men arrested were stripped to check them for weapons. “After checking them we supplied them with clothes,” he said.
Gaza medics said at least two children had died inside the intensive care unit after Israeli fire hit the generators and oxygen station in the facility on Friday.
The military said civilians at the hospital were kept safe, despite heavy fighting near the complex. Fuel, medical equipment and blood units had been provided to the hospital and electricity and oxygen supply had been ensured, it said.
Kremlin says Russia is doing all it can to try to de-escalate Middle East tensions
- Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made the comments when asked about the aftermath of Israeli strikes on Iran
MOSCOW: The Kremlin said on Monday that Russia was doing everything it could to try to facilitate attempts to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East by urging restraint on all sides.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made the comments when asked about the aftermath of Israeli strikes on Iran.
“Russia is maintaining contacts with all parties to this conflict. We have contacts with Tehran, and we have contacts with the Israelis and the Palestinians,” Peskov told reporters.
“Russia is constantly doing everything possible to call on the parties to show restraint and to facilitate any attempts to de-escalate tensions..” adding “There is still an extremely tense situation in the region and, of course, it is very important now to promote restraint in this regard.”
