This Sunday, Hamas launched a rocket attack against the Tel Aviv region, in central Israel, a region that they had not hit in the last four months and in which the alarm sirens have sounded again today. Early in the afternoon, the Israeli army reported the downing of an unspecified number of a total of eight projectiles. Earlier, Hamas had announced a “major attack” on its social media accounts. This attack has only caused two minor injuries, according to the newspaper Haaretzbut it has shown that the Palestinian fundamentalist movement still retains the capacity to attack, not only the Israeli region bordering Gaza, but even the center of the country and Tel Aviv, its second most populated city after Jerusalem, about 70 kilometers from the border. northern Palestinian territory.
According to the Israeli army, these rockets came from Rafah, the town in the southern tip of Gaza where, until May 7, more than a million displaced Gazans were taking refuge. That day, Israeli tanks took control of the city’s border crossing with Egypt, closed since then, and began a progressive ground offensive that has already forced more than 800,000 people to flee, according to the United Nations.
Israel has tried to justify the military invasion in Rafah — to which even its main ally, the United States, has objected for fear of a large-scale massacre — by arguing that Hamas brigades that have not yet been dismantled They are hiding there, so attacking the city is essential to put an end to the organization and free the 121 hostages who still remain, dead or alive, in Gaza, the two objectives declared by Israel to try to justify the war. The Hamas attack this Sunday has reinforced those arguments in the eyes of the Israeli Government. On a visit to Israeli troops in the southern Palestinian city, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated that the need for the offensive in Rafah is now “clearer” and that it is necessary to recover the abductees and “dismantle Hamas.”
The most far-right sector of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government coalition has gone even further than the head of Defense. For that radical wing of the Israeli Executive, the progressive invasion of Rafah is not enough, a frustration that has once again expressed. One of the exponents of this ultra faction, the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, has taken advantage of the barrage of rockets in the Tel Aviv region to demand, as he has been doing for weeks, an invasion of Rafah “with full force.” Ben Gvir is not part of the Israeli War Cabinet, which makes military decisions, but he does have influence over Netanyahu, due to his ability to break the coalition that keeps the current prime minister at the head of the most right-wing government in the seven decades of history of the country.
On Friday, the UN International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop its invasion of Rafah, in response to South Africa’s request that it take new precautionary measures in the genocide case brought by the African country. The Israeli authorities have ignored and have not stopped their attacks on the city that, until May, was presented as a “safe zone” by Israel, despite the fact that it has never stopped bombing it in the almost eight months that the war has lasted. . Less than two weeks before that anniversary, the health authorities of the Strip governed by Hamas have raised the death toll this Sunday to 35,984, of which 71% are children and women; and the number of injured has risen to 80,643 since last October 7. Gazan authorities insist that these data do not include 10,000 missing people who remain under the rubble
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Meeting
The Israeli War Cabinet plans to meet this Sunday late afternoon at the Kirya military complex in Tel Aviv to discuss the war in Gaza, precisely “focusing on Rafah,” it says. Haaretz. Another issue that will be addressed at that meeting will be the negotiations to free the hostages. The newspaper assures that there are “new proposals” to achieve that objective, which were raised during a meeting held this weekend in Paris between an Israeli delegation and representatives of the United States and Qatar, two of the mediating countries between the parties in previous rounds. negotiators.
None of them led to the permanent ceasefire that Hamas demands or a new pact to exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners that Israel aspires to. The negotiations have thus been stalled since the short-lived truce between the two and the first hostage exchange agreement that took place in November of last year. In that meeting in the French capital, the head of the Israeli Mossad, David Barnea, the director of the American CIA, William Burns, and the Prime Minister of Qatar, Mohamed Bin Adbulrahman Al Thani, participated. The North American network BBC had previously reported, citing an Egyptian official, that talks between Israel and Hamas will resume on Tuesday in Cairo.
Since the beginning of the Israeli land incursion into Rafah, the humanitarian situation in the Strip has worsened due to the closure of the Rafah border post, through which most of the humanitarian aid destined for the Gazans previously entered, which was already very insufficient before. , according to the UN and NGOs. This Sunday, around 200 trucks loaded with supplies for the Gazan population have begun to enter Gaza through another border crossing, Kerem Shalom, also in the south of the Palestinian enclave, reported Khaled Zayer, the head of the Red Crescent. in northern Sinai. The entry of these vehicles is due to an agreement between the president of the United States, Joe Biden, and the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattá al Sisi, last Friday to route aid through that border post temporarily.
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