• Amid Israeli bombardment, Hezbollah launches ‘initial response’ to Aruri’s killing
• EU opposes Netanyahu’s policy about Hamas
• 120 killed in past 24 hours
• Palestinians reject governance plan for Gaza
• Amid Israeli bombardment, Hezbollah launches ‘initial response’ to Aruri’s killing
• EU opposes Netanyahu’s policy about Hamas
• 120 killed in past 24 hours
• Palestinians reject governance plan for Gaza

GAZA STRIP: Israel bombed southern Gaza on Saturday as the UN warned that the besieged Palestinian territory has been rendered “uninhabitable” by three months of war.

Top Western diplomats were in the region as part of a fresh push to boost the flow of aid into Gaza and address mounting fears of a wider conflict.

The Egyptian Red Cr­e­scent on Friday said 1,200 water purifiers, 100 oxygen cylinders, one oxygen generator, 1,000 solar-powered items, 24 power generators and 418 medical supplies had been blocked by Israel from reaching Gaza since the conflict started.

The fighting, triggered by the October 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas, has sent tensions soaring across the region, and shows no signs of abating with the conflict entering its fourth month.

Civilians in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip have borne the brunt of the violence as the scale of the destruction has triggered mass displacement and a deepening humanitarian crisis.

With swathes of the territory already redu­c­ed to rubble, UN huma­nitarian chief Martin Griffiths said “Gaza has simply become uninhabitable”.

The UN official said famine was “around the corner” as people in Gaza faced the “highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded”.

Gaza had become “a place of death and despair”, said Griffiths. “Hope has never been more elusive.”

A public health disaster is unfolding as infectious diseases spread in overcrowded shelters, Griffiths said.

Around 180 Palestin­ian women “are giving birth daily amidst this chaos”, Griffiths said in a statement issued by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

AFP correspondents reported Israeli strikes on the southern city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter from the fighting.

On Israel’s northern border, Lebanon’s Hez­bol­lah group said it lau­nched its “initial respo­nse” to the killing of Hamas’s deputy leader Saleh al-Aruri in Beirut. A US defence official has told AFP that Israel carried out the strike, which Israel has not claimed.

Hezbollah said it had targeted the Israeli military’s Meron air control base with 62 missiles, while the Israeli army reported “approximately 40 launches from Leba­non” early on Saturday, and said it struck Hezbollah “military sites” in response.

A military spokesperson confirmed the mountaintop base had been targeted but did not say whether it was damaged.

No casualties were reported in Israel.

Lebanon’s Jama’a Islamiya Islamist group said it had also fired two volleys of rockets at Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel, in the third operation claimed by the militant Sunni group since Oct. 7.

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, on a visit to Beirut, warned against a wider war.

“It is imperative to avoid regional escalation in the Middle East. It is absolutely necessary to avoid Lebanon being dragged into a regional conflict,” he said.

Before heading to Saudi Arabia, Borrell called for a redoubling of peace efforts.

“Israel has declared a goal to eradicate Hamas. There must be another way to eradicate Hamas that doesn’t… create so many people getting killed,” he said.

In the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah, men clambered carefully around the concrete ruins and twisted rebar where Mohammad al-Attar’s house stood before rockets that he blamed on Israel destroyed it.

“There was no prior warning or anything,” Attar said, his hands sta­ined grey from the debris. “There’s still the corpse of a little girl” underneath.

A spokesperson for the Israeli military claimed that “we have completed dismantling Hamas’s ‘military framework’ in northern Gaza and killed around 8,000 of its fighters in that area.

The Israeli forces have also seized tens of thousands of weapons in Gaza’s north and millions of documents, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in an online briefing.

“We are now focused on dismantling Hamas in the centre and south of the Gaza Strip.”

Over 20 deaths in family

In a statement on Sat­ur­day, the Gaza health min­­istry said it had recorded more than 120 deaths over the past 24 hours.

Victims of renewed Israeli bombardment were brought to the Eur­o­pean Hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis, where relatives and mourners gathered.

One of them, Moha­med Awad, wept over the body of a 12-year-old boy and counted the deaths in his family.

“My brother, his wife, his children, his relatives and the brothers of his wife — there are more than 20 martyrs,” Awad, a journalist, told AFP.

Another Palestinian jo­urnalist, Akram El-Shafei, died at the hospital from wounds sustained in Gaza City in November, making him “the 117th journalist…killed by the Israeli occupation during this crazy war”, Asser Yassin of the Palestinian Media Forum said.

Yassin charged that Israel “targets journalists” but that “only increases our determination to… convey the suffering and pain” to the world.

Shafei’s condition had initially improved, said relative Magda El-Shafei, but he “needed treatment” and there was “nothing” available. “He’s gone,” she told AFP.

The World Health Organisation says the majority of Gaza’s 36 hospitals have been put out of action by the fighting, while remaining medical facilities face dire shortages.

Diplomatic push

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Turkey on the first leg of a tour that will take him to Greece and several Arab states ahead of talks in Israel and the Occupied West Bank next week.

A senior US administration official said Blinken would press Israel to increase aid to Palestinians and move to a combat phase that allows the displaced to start returning home.

Much of the discussions with Arab leaders will focus on containing the violence and looking at how Gaza can be governed once the fighting ends, said the US official, whose country is Israel’s biggest political and military backer.

In a video message shared by his office, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, said that “the future and stability of our region are closely linked to our Palestinian cause”.

The secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation executive committee, Hussein al-Sheikh, said Gaza’s future “is determined by the Palestinian people, not Israel”.

He was responding to Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s release of a draft plan for Gaza’s post-war governance that spoke of Palestinian “civil committees” taking gradual control, while Israel would “reserve its operational freedom of action” throughout the territory.

Pro-Palestinian protesters blocked roads outside the parliament in London, demanding an immediate ceasefire in the conflict and clashing with police who prevented them from marching across Westminster Bridge.

Police said they had imposed a legal order limiting the location of the protests and that by 3pm (1500 GMT) people had begun to disperse. Those who refused to comply with an order to leave would be arrested, police said.

Published in Dawn, January 7th, 2024