Israel does not forget Gaza or the Gazans in the midst of its offensive on Lebanon. “No tunnel is too deep, Sinwar. Ask Nasrallah,” warn the pamphlets launched over the Strip with warnings in Arabic towards the top leader of Hamas, Yahia Sinwar, who is assured that the same fate awaits him as the top leader of Hezbollah, Hasan Nasrallah, assassinated on the 28th. September during a bombing raid on Beirut. Along with these threats, the army maintains pressure on the Mediterranean enclave, where close-range clashes with the Palestinian armed resistance persist, and where local health authorities reported this Wednesday that the dead now exceed 42,000, most of them civilians. .
In the north of the Strip, Israel has launched a new offensive in an area that it has already devastated several times in the last year. There are bombings, the advance of troops on the largest refugee camp, Yabalia, orders for the expulsion of the inhabitants and threats to evict and close the hospitals. At the same time, a hundred hostages remain in the hands of Hamas, while Sinwar remains uncaptured or killed, although he is located in the southern half of Gaza. “There will be no safe place underground, nor on the surface of the Earth,” adds the threat spread from the air and reported by the Israeli press.
On Tuesday, those responsible for the Kamal Adwan hospital, in Beit Lahia, were warned by the Israeli military, stationed in the surrounding area, that they had 24 hours to vacate the center of staff and patients, a deadline that expires this Wednesday, according to the complaint. the director, Hossam Abu Safia, through a recorded message. Health authorities in the Strip, where Hamas rules, reported that these threats have extended to the Indonesian hospital and Al Awda. They also report the death of 45 people in the last 24 hours, which has led to the number of deaths in the war now exceeding 42,000. These three centers, the main ones in the north, currently have a total of 317 hospitalized patients, of which about 80 are in intensive care, warns Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
In parallel, the army has issued new evacuation orders to the inhabitants of three large urban centers in the north: Jabalia, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanun, which Israel justifies with the argument of preventing Hamas from rebuilding its capabilities. The refugee camp, where the army claims to have killed dozens of members of the armed resistance in recent hours, has been taken over by tanks and soldiers and is experiencing what some residents describe as the worst fighting since May.
“The soldiers are shooting at anyone who moves,” warns the Red Crescent, referring to areas in western Yabalia, which makes it impossible to respond to calls from the wounded. Since Tuesday, the siege on that refugee camp has increased with earth barriers and points to control exit and entry after imposing a ban on the arrival of food, water and medicine in previous days, denounces the Palestinian NGO Al Mezan. They understand that “the systematic elimination of the Palestinian presence” is part of it.
“These massive forced evacuations of homes and the bombing of neighborhoods by Israeli forces are turning northern Gaza into an uninhabitable wasteland” where no foreign aid has arrived since October 1, MSF says in a statement. “Suddenly, they told me that we had to leave the north,” says Mahmoud, a security guard for this humanitarian organization, who left Jabalia to take refuge in an NGO house in Gaza City, according to a recorded testimony. Like him, six other employees have escaped from the north in the last hours. “We left our house in despair, under bombs, missiles and artillery. It was very, very difficult. I would rather die than be moved south; “My home is here and I don’t want to leave,” adds the MSF employee.
The United Nations criticizes these forced displacements of the “hell” that the northern area of Gaza has been converted into for months, where there are 400,000 people trapped, estimates the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini. He refers especially to the largest refugee camp in the Strip, Yabalia, where occupation troops claim to have killed dozens of “terrorists” in recent days. “Many refuse because they know very well that no place in Gaza is safe,” he insists, referring to the constant dance to which the Israeli authorities are subjecting the inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave, a strategy that they are also putting into practice in Lebanon.
The area in the south of Gaza, Al Mawasi and Deir el Balah (center), to which Israel is trying to push the remaining inhabitants in the north is saturated by more than a million people and does not meet the minimum conditions to be inhabited, MSF insists.
Amid military pressure, the shelters and services provided by UNRWA in the north are being “forced to close”, some for the first time since the conflict began, adds the head of the agency, which facilitates the expansion of the Hunger in an area where it has been a problem for months now. At the same time, Lazzarini warns in a statement on his profile on the social network X (formerly Twitter), Israel is endangering the second phase of polio vaccination.
Since the army took the Strip by land at the end of October 2023, it has systematically had to return to areas of the Palestinian enclave where it considered Hamas resistance eliminated. That is what is happening these days in the north. The army maintains its operations “throughout the Strip” and has killed “dozens of terrorists in close-range clashes and airstrikes,” a statement said.
The Strip and Lebanon are two scenarios, less than 200 kilometers apart, that are part of the same war that enters its second year surrounded by uncertainties. The Jewish State maintains its military machinery deployed on the ground on both battlefields. In addition to the south, Israel has increased pressure on its northern neighbor in the last three weeks with intense bombings in different regions, an unprecedented attack with explosions in hundreds of Hezbollah’s communication devices, assassinations at the top of its leadership and the land invasion with thousands of troops. There are more than 2,000 dead and more than a million displaced.
The same uncertainty that weighs on the recently begun invasion of Lebanon continues to weigh on Gaza a year later. Not only are there no signs of the troops leaving, but movements like the one these days in the north point to a possible total expulsion of the inhabitants to consolidate the Israeli occupation. The government plans that are being hatched for the post-war Strip, for a territory freed from the power that the polls granted to Hamas, seem increasingly distant when there is not even a glimpse of an agreement that would allow the release of the hostages.
In order to address the future, “it is vital and urgent” a provisional authority in the Palestinian-controlled Strip to serve as a transition to the new government, supports Said Zeedani, a retired professor of philosophy at Al Quds University, in an article published in +972 Magazine. In that body that would act as a temporary hinge would be “national figures” respected and accepted by Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority, although without their leaders, and authorities of those States that are going to be the pillars of reconstruction.