Not just Rafah. North, center and south Gaza suffer one of the deadliest waves of Israeli bombing in recent weeks, while UN Secretary General António Guterres denounces the “chaos” and “total anarchy” left by eight months of Israeli invasion . The Ministry of Health of the Hamas Government in the Strip has reported 101 deaths and 169 injuries in the last 24 hours. More than a third (42) in two attacks this Saturday in residential areas of the capital. The military has identified the targets as “Hamas military infrastructure sites” and said it would provide details later. Local media point to the targeted assassination of Raad Saad, a commander of Hamas’s armed wing who Israel describes as its chief of operations. With little progress in the negotiation of a ceasefire and all eyes on the border of Israel and Lebanon, for fear of a second war, this one with Hezbollah, the Israeli troops in Gaza have been increasing their bombings since Wednesday and are trying to take all the city of Rafah.
The latest figures represent the highest number of Gazans killed since June 7, when massive bombings to enable Israeli special forces to rescue four hostages claimed 274 lives (the army acknowledged at least 100) in the refugee camp of Nuseirat.
With the bombing this Saturday in Al Shati, a well-known refugee camp in the capital, the fighter-bombers left 24 dead, a crater with the rubble of a building and the five surrounding buildings without walls, as can be seen in television images . There are also at least a dozen bodies in the hospital, two of them children, which brings the total in the war to 37,551, according to data from the health authorities of the Strip.
The building attacked had three floors, the Al Jazeera correspondent reported at the scene. Emergency services are having trouble reaching dead bodies and rescuing survivors from the rubble. The missiles launched by the fighter-bombers generated three fires and raised a cloud of dust from which people could be seen emerging. The other attack in the capital, in the Al Tuffah neighborhood, caused 18 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health.
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The double bombing occurs a day after the Palestinian Red Crescent reported a massacre in Al Mawasi, the area defined by Israel as humanitarian and to which it orders the population to go. He attributed it to a bombing of the tent area by the Israeli army, whose preliminary investigation indicates that it did not attack there, but is still “reviewing” what happened. The relatives were still crying this Saturday for the 25 fatalities, whom they hugged before the burials.
Looting
All this in an environment of “chaos” and “total anarchy”, which affects many mouths and which the Secretary General of the United Nations denounced this Saturday. “We have attacks, bombings and then the troops move to other places,” Guterres said. “Hamas returns to the original places and there is total chaos in Gaza. There is no authority in most of the territory.” Since Friday, the Palestinian militiamen have been trying to stop the armored vehicles from entering the two areas of Rafah that they do not control with grenade launchers and booby-trapped explosives hidden along the road. It is where the army focuses its advance, along with the areas around Deir al Balah, in the center, which it has not invaded.
Guterres has regretted the looting of “most of the trucks with humanitarian aid in Gaza”, because “this is a war unlike any other”, in which Israel “does not even allow the so-called ‘blue police’ to escort the convoys” of aid, which generates “extreme difficulty” in distributing it. They are police officers of the local administration. Objective of Israel, which has among its plans the complete elimination of the Islamist movement’s capabilities not only to fight, but also to govern the Strip.
The Israeli invasion has created a vicious circle around order and authority that affects the distribution of humanitarian aid and everyday life. In addition to using – to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the context – hunger as a weapon of war, the army controls the majority of the Strip. But it is not responsible for protecting the convoys, nor does it distribute humanitarian aid. “That our soldiers put their lives at risk to rescue hostages, yes; to distribute food, no,” summarized last week in an interview with television channel 14 Benny Gantz, fresh from the war government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, precisely due to the absence of a strategic compass. The protection of convoys depends a lot on agreements with communities, payments to family clans, etc.
But, at the same time, it also does not allow a civil authority to take control. On the one hand, he kills or arrests anyone who carries the Hamas label (like the blue police officers cited by Guterres, who are afraid to escort convoys because Israel identifies them and bombs them). On the other hand, he opposes handing over to the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) the keys to civilian control of Gaza, as would correspond to it within the framework of the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Netanyahu assures that no one will dare to volunteer until Israel “ends Hamas,” something he saw months ago “within reach.” Their plan consists of convincing Gazans with no ties to Hamas or the ANP to take charge of the day-to-day affairs (bureaucracy, sewage, internal security…) under the political and economic umbrella of a coalition of Arab countries and with the troops. Israelis doing whatever raids in Gaza they deem necessary. In an interview this Thursday, Netanyahu spoke of a “civil administration” that has “inter-Arab support,” receives economic aid from Arab countries and applies “some kind of deradicalization process, which would begin in schools and mosques to teach “to those people a different future than annihilating Israel and killing all the Jews on the planet.”
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