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Under an agreement between Egypt, Israel and Hamas – and negotiated through Qatar – a number of foreigners and other seriously injured people were allowed to leave the besieged territory.
Egypt has hospitals set up in Sheikh Zuwayed, Sinai.
An Egyptian security source said the deal allowed up to 500 foreign passport holders to pass through Rafah on Wednesday, but that there was no connection to the release of some 240 hostages held through Hamas.
Or a “humanitarian pause” in the fighting, something that many countries have done and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far rejected.
Fathi Abu al-Hassan, a U. S. passport holder, has been in Gaza for three months.
“No water, no food, no shelter, nothing. We open our eyes to the dead and we open our eyes to the dead. “
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid also quickly passed by.
It’s unclear how long the passage will remain open for evacuations.
Israel has its forces in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip after weeks of aerial and artillery bombardments.
In retaliation for a deadly attack by the Islamist organization in southern Israel that killed about 300 foot soldiers and about 1,100 civilians on Oct. 7, according to Israeli figures.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, more than 8,700 Palestinians, many of them children, have since been killed by Israeli airstrikes.
By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Dan Williams
GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli forces killed the Hamas commander on Wednesday in their second attack on Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp in two days, the army said, as the first organization of civilians evacuated from the besieged enclave crossed the Egyptian border.
Continuing an offensive in support of Hamas militants, Israel has again bombed the densely populated Gaza Strip from land, sea and air in its crusade against the Islamist organization after its deadly cross-border attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Palestinians rummaged through the rubble in a desperate search for victims trapped after Israel’s attack on Jabalia, Gaza’s largest refugee camp.
“It’s a massacre,” a witness to the strike.
The Israeli military said its warplanes struck a Hamas commando and compound in Jabalia “on the basis of accurate intelligence,” killing the head of the Islamist group’s anti-tank missile unit, Muhammad A’sar.
“Hamas intentionally builds its terror infrastructure under, around and inside civilian buildings, intentionally endangering Gaza’s civilians,” one Israeli said.
U. N. human rights officials have said the operation could possibly amount to a war crime.
“Given the high number of civilian casualties and the scale of destruction resulting from Israeli airstrikes on the Jabalia refugee camp, we are gravely concerned that these are disproportionate attacks that may amount to war crimes,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote on social media. Site X.
Gaza’s government did not provide figures on casualties from Wednesday’s explosion in the camp. Palestinian health officials said Tuesday’s first Israeli airstrike killed about 50 more people and wounded 150.
Tuesday’s attack by Israel killed Ibrahim Biari, whom it described as one of the ringleaders of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
U. S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Israel and Jordan on Friday, the State Department announced. He will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take stock of the Israeli military’s goals, he said.
VISIONS OF DEATH
Dr. Fathi Abu al-Hassan, a U. S. passport holder hoping to enter Egypt, described how hellish Gaza is, with no water, food or shelter.
“We open our eyes to the dead and we open our eyes to the dead,” he said as he waited to cross the Egyptian border.
“If this were to happen in the country . . . Even in the desert, (people) would come together to (help us),” he said.
Among those evacuated to Egypt, who have been trapped in Gaza since the war began on October 7, were passport holders from Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Jordan, the United Kingdom and the United States. .
They crossed the Rafah border crossing and underwent security checks, he said.
On Wednesday, at least 320 foreign passport holders from an initial list of 500 and dozens of seriously wounded Gazans left, Egyptian sources and a Palestinian official said, as part of a deal between Egypt, Israel and Hamas.
At least 49 other people evacuated for medical reasons arrived in Egypt, the governor of Egypt’s North Sinai province later told reporters.
Nahed Abu Taeema, director of Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, told Reuters evacuees would arrive with 19 seriously wounded patients from his hospital, in addition to children, who require complex surgery.
Some 1,000 Palestinian youths from Gaza have been treated in hospitals in the United Arab Emirates, accompanied by their families, the official United Arab Emirates news agency, WAM, reported.
Gaza’s border government said the border would be reopened on Thursday so that more foreign passport holders could leave. A diplomatic source briefed on the Egyptian plans said some 7,500 foreign passport holders would be evacuated from Gaza in about two weeks.
HAMAS CAN’T RULE GAZA IN THE FUTURE, WHITE HOUSE SAYS
Israel sent ground forces into the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip last week, after weeks of air and artillery strikes, in retaliation for the marvelous Hamas attack in which, according to Israel, 1,400 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 240 were taken hostage.
Gaza’s Ministry of Public Health says at least 8,796 Palestinians living in the coastal enclave, in addition to 3,648 children, have been killed by Israeli actions since Oct. 7.
The Israeli military said one soldier was killed in Gaza on Wednesday, out of 15 who died on Tuesday. Hamas rocket fire continued, accompanied by precautionary sirens, in communities in southern Israel, as well as in the Mediterranean port cities of Ashkelon and Ashdod.
“We are in a complicated war,” Netanyahu said. I promise all the citizens of Israel: we will do our homework. We will move forward to victory. “
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday that Washington does not believe Hamas is simply worried about the Gaza government once the war ends.
Despite the rising civilian death toll in Gaza, Kirby also said the U. S. had not come time for a general ceasefire, but that humanitarian pauses in hostilities were necessary.
Hospitals have struggled to cope with fuel shortages that have forced them to close. Israel has refused to allow humanitarian convoys to bring fuel to the destroyed enclave, fearing that Hamas fighters may simply divert it for military purposes.
Medical student Ezzedine Lulu, who was jogging at Gaza’s Al Shifa Hospital, filmed herself walking through corridors full of sleeping young people taking shelter from the bombardment.
“I can heal the wounds, I can prevent bleeding, I can’t cure the lack of blood in those children’s bodies. I see them trembling in their sleep, they have nothing to cover themselves with. Winter is coming. . . Stop the inhumanity,” he said.
The desperate humanitarian situation is a global concern, with a lack of food, fuel, clean water and medicine.
Jordan, one of the few Arab states that has normalized relations with Israel, announced on Wednesday that it will withdraw its ambassador from Tel Aviv until Israel ends its assault on Gaza. Israel said it regretted Jordan’s decision.
Yemen’s Houthi movement, which like Hamas is subsidized through Iran, said last Wednesday that it had introduced a giant batch of drones to several targets in Israel.
The organization “will continue to carry out military operations against the Palestinians until the Israeli aggression in Gaza ceases,” Houthi army spokesman Yahya Sareahe said.
(Reporting via Nidal al-Mughrabi and Emily Rose; further reporting via Reuters bureaus; writing by Angus MacSwan, Gareth Jones and Cynthia Osterman; editing by Louise Heavens, William Maclean, Mark Heinrich and Howard Goller)