For the fourth consecutive week, Israel maintains high intensity bombings on northern Gaza. The pace of this offensive, with hundreds of deaths, according to local health sources, is not affected by the recovery of negotiations in Doha for a possible truce, the death in combat of the top leader of Hamas, the humanitarian crisis that shakes hundreds of thousands of people or international pressure on the Government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is almost always at night when the Israeli aviation unloads its projectiles on areas inhabited by civilians and which, according to the official version of the Jewish State, are human shields used by the Palestinian armed resistance around their command centers. The latest scene of this offensive has been a residential area of Beit Lahiya, in the north of the Strip. According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, at least 60 people have lost their lives, with another 17 still missing and 150 injured. Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the media office of the Gazan government, controlled by the Hamas militia, raises the number of casualties to 93.
The target of this new bombing has been a five-story building. An important part of the victims are women and children, like the majority of the more than 43,000 dead in the enclave during the current war, according to local authorities and UN calculations. The last weeks of siege have reduced the already low care capacity of hospitals, where it is often impossible to transfer the wounded and the dead due to the presence of the military or the attacks. The Israeli offensive continues at the same time that hardly any humanitarian aid reaches the local population, which, in some cases, leaves that northern area of the Strip pushed by the army’s forced evacuation orders.
The biggest humanitarian crisis in the Strip coincides with the approval late on Monday of two laws in the Israeli Parliament that prohibit the activities of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), the main agency in charge of caring for the Gazan population.
The Kamal Adwan hospital has been one of the targets of the occupation troops in recent days. It is one of the three main centers that try to cope, with hardly any resources, with the hundreds of wounded and corpses that arrive. After days of siege, the military took it for a few hours last weekend. Images followed one another of dozens of men of all ages forced to stay in their underwear in the middle of the rubble that surrounds the place. Arrests and interrogations were carried out. The hospital director himself, Husam Abu Safieh, was one of them. “They have arrested me and questioned me. I was then taken to the hospital, where 31 medical staff were detained. Yesterday they killed my 21-year-old son,” he responded to Morning Express by message on Sunday after 48 hours without doing so.
Videos recorded by local journalists show Safieh in his white coat carrying the stretcher with the body and crying over the young man’s body before proceeding to the funeral. Videos from inside the facilities show great disarray as well as significant damage.
The army reported on Monday the arrest of a hundred members of the armed resistance, “terrorists”, according to the official Israeli version, during a “precise operation against a Hamas terrorist stronghold” in the hospital. They said they had found weapons, cash and documents belonging to what is known as the Islamic Resistance Movement during the raid. They also accused Hamas members of disguising themselves as medical personnel. The Israeli army also published a video in which, supposedly, a Kamal Adwan ambulance driver with his face blurred so as not to be recognized and whose identity is unknown recognizes that Hamas operated in the facilities.
One of the doctors who remained missing was surgeon Mohamed Obaid, another of those detained during the Israeli military raid in Kamal Adwan and who works with Doctors Without Borders (MSF). This NGO had lost contact with him on Friday. Two days before, he informed this newspaper for the last time about the situation in northern Gaza, after his house was attacked and he had to take refuge with his family in the Kamal Adwan hospital after spending weeks practicing at another center, Al Awda. “I can’t find words to describe this horrible situation,” he lamented.
MSF has received confirmation that Obeid is currently detained by Israeli forces. The organization is in contact with the Israeli authorities and continues to call for the safety and protection of its colleague, as well as all medical personnel in Gaza.
Israel also does not lift its foot in its offensive in Lebanon. The bombings during the night in the Beka Valley, in the east of the Arab country, have caused the death of more than 60 people in several localities, according to the district governor, who affirms that it was the bloodiest morning in more than a year of conflict in the area. According to Israel, in the last few hours it has attacked 110 Hezbollah targets in the south of the country, although it has not specified where, without mentioning attacks in the valley.
The governor of the Beká Valley district, Bachir Jodor, has put the death toll at 67 in a dozen localities, with more than 120 injured. He maintains that the army did not issue evacuation orders in any case and that the number of victims may increase, given that the emergency services continue this morning searching for victims among the rubble of the affected buildings. “That includes only the people whose bodies have been extracted from the rubble, we still do not have a final balance. “This is the most violent day for the Beká Valley in the last year,” Jodor told the Reuters agency.
