Airstrikes, artillery fire and fighting on the ground gave no respite in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, 31 December. At least 40 Palestinians were killed in overnight airstrikes in Gaza City. In weeks, the Israeli army has been deployed in northern Gaza and then in Khan Younes. (south) and, more specifically, to camps in the middle of that territory.
Some 1. 9 million citizens (85 per cent of the population) have had to flee their homes because of the fighting. And this, as the World Health Organization (WHO) sounds the alarm about the growing risk of spreading infectious diseases and humanitarian aid is needed.
Israeli army operations in the Gaza Strip have killed 21,822 people, mostly women, young people and teenagers, since the war began on Oct. 7, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Public Health in the Gaza Strip.
The forced displacement of Palestinians and difficulties in delivering aid led South Africa to file a petition with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of “acts of genocide against the Palestinian people. “in Gaza. “
In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “We will continue our defensive war, the justice and ethics of which are unprecedented. The army “does everything it can to harm civilians, while Hamas does everything it can to harm them and uses them as human shields,” the Israeli prime minister said. added the prime minister at the opening of an assembly of his government. He said the Jewish state’s forces were acting “as ethically as possible” in the Gaza Strip. “No, South Africa, we are not the ones who came here to perpetrate Hamas. He would kill us all if he could,” Netanyahu added.
The Israeli operations were launched in retaliation for the unprecedented October 7 attack by Hamas’ military wing, which resulted in the deaths of around 1,140 people in Israel, mostly civilians. according to the latest official Israeli data, and the taking hostage of some 250 people.
As part of a first agreement, several dozen of them were released in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, and more than a hundred are still held in the Gaza Strip. On Saturday evening, more than a thousand people demonstrated in Tel Aviv in support of these hostages and their loved ones, chanting “bring them home! “.
According to the American Axios and Israeli Ynet sites, Qatar informed Israel that Hamas accepted the principle of a resumption of talks with a view to the release of more than forty hostages in exchange for a ceasefire that could last extend up to a month.
A delegation from Hamas, a movement classified as a terrorist movement by the EU, the United States and Israel among others, arrived in Cairo on Friday to explain “the reaction of the Palestinian factions” to an Egyptian plan to hold hostages and stop the fighting.
That reaction will occur “in the coming days,” Muhammad Al-Hindi, undersecretary of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an armed organization that fights alongside Hamas, said in a statement.
Questioned on Saturday evening, Benjamin Netanyahu remained evasive about these behind-the-scenes negotiations. “Hamas issued a whole series of ultimatums which we rejected. (…) We see a change, [but] I do not want to create expectations,” he declared, assuring that “the war will continue for several months.”
The Minister of the French Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, will travel on Sunday New Year’s Eve aboard the Dixmude, the French helicopter carrier anchored in the Egyptian port of El-Arish, where wounded civilians from Gaza are being treated. The Minister will be received at 2. 15 p. m. (13:15 in Paris) on the boat.
Arriving at the dock on November 27, the Dixmude received dozens of injured people the next day, the minister’s office said – between five and twenty per day, according to local health sources.
France is the “first Western force to place fitness facilities so close to the Gaza Strip,” according to the French ministry, which specifies that the other people treated suffer from serious pathologies. The Diksmuide is anchored about 50 kilometers from the Rafah crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, where humanitarian aid is pouring in.
The ship’s hospital structure includes two operating theaters, forty beds, more than eighty caregivers, scanners and analysis laboratories, Mr. Lecornu said when the Dixmude arrived in Egypt.
It welcomes French doctors from the military fitness service, who have been in high demand in recent years in the medical field of military operations and during the Covid-19 crisis, but also Belgian, Danish and Jordanian fitness staff.