Israel extends offensive on Gaza as focus shifts to Lebanon

A truck carrying a large container arrived in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, last Wednesday. He carried no food or medical supplies. Inside, the bodies of 88 people lay. Upon hearing the news, many Palestinians came to see if among those dead were any of those loved ones whose fate they do not know. The corpses were unrecognizable, decomposed; some reduced to bones. Those remains had been brought in and abandoned by the Israeli military in the street, a woman told the media. Middle East Eye. Israel did not provide any information that would allow them to be identified. Stripped of their name and their history, these Palestinians have been buried in a mass grave.

These 88 deaths have been added to a list that already far exceeds 41,000 people and that these days has continued to increase while international attention shifted towards the possible Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Meanwhile, Israeli warplanes bombed a school that housed hundreds of refugees this Thursday. At least 14 people, including several children, died at the Al Faluja school in the northern town of Jabalia, according to the Gaza Civil Defense services. Several dozen others were injured.

That attack has not been the only one these days. Israel has more than 300 combat aircraft, according to the American think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), enough to attack Lebanon by air, as it has been doing these days, without ceasing to bomb Gaza. . This Friday morning, several Palestinians were killed in different Israeli airstrikes in the Strip, according to the Palestinian agency Wafa. At least three died in a bombardment against displaced persons’ tents at the Martyrs of Al Aqsa hospital, in Deir al Balah, in the center of the territory. Further south in Khan Yunis, several people were injured by Israeli artillery fire which, according to Wafa, “hit a group of civilians.”

Haizam Amirah Fernández, an analyst specialized in international relations in the Middle East, believes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is interested in extending the war in Lebanon while the war in Gaza continues. The president, he assures, “cannot stop the war because then he would go to jail.” With the threat of extending the war to Lebanon, “it seeks its political survival”, while trying to forget “its enormous failure” in Gaza, where it has not achieved “none of the objectives it set for itself”, and that what follows there happening remains “like a footnote.”

Death and hunger

The organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has had to open two new field hospitals in the Strip in recent days, both in the town of Deir al Balah, the NGO recalls. In the second, in a period of two hours, the influx of patients was 180 people. Federica Lezzi, a pediatric surgeon for the organization, recalled that week in an open letter that Palestinians in Gaza continue to die, as they have done in the almost year-long war, in Israeli bombings, buried under their homes or by the practice destruction of the Gazan health system.

“The sounds of the bombing sound very close and vivid, but no one flees. “I haven’t heard it,” they often reply. [los gazatíes]. They are responses to a trauma that does not have time to heal because it is continuous,” the surgeon writes. “In Gaza, there is no longer salat al fajr, the dawn prayer… now the only thing that interrupts the night are the flashes of the bombs. The earth shakes, the noise never stops,” he continues.

The surgeon recounts the case of a girl injured in an Israeli attack, Mariam, whose leg is “covered in a tangle of nails and metal rods,” and whose skin is cracked by malnutrition. “Today, if they don’t shoot you in the chest or head, the target is your legs. Furthermore, the row of ribs under Mariam’s skin is a merciless reminder that, beyond bombs and bullets, people in Gaza also die from lack of food and water. Surviving is a daily challenge, as is getting drinking water, cooking or showering,” he denounces.

On September 17, a report prepared by various organizations that work in Gaza – Save the Children, Oxfam and the Norwegian Refugee Council, among others – found that Israel blocks 83% of the food that should enter the enclave. If at the end of 2023, with the war already started, Gazans ate twice a day, now many of them eat only once, hopefully. These organizations estimate that by the end of the year 50,000 Gazan children between six months and five years old “will urgently need treatment for malnutrition.”

An MSF spokesperson confirms to this newspaper that, as has been happening since the start of the war, in October 2023, “aid, when it is not completely blocked [por Israel]arrives in dribs and drabs and cannot in any way adequately satisfy the immense needs of the population of Gaza.” That population now faces the upcoming arrival of winter without the bare minimum to survive.

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