The Truce Is Over; Ethnic Cleansing And Genocide Resumes In Gaza


  • December 1, 2023
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Israel resumed its assault on the Gaza Strip Friday morning just minutes after the pause with Hamas officially expired, ending a fragile seven-day truce that created conditions for the release of hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian captives and allowed additional—but still inadequate—humanitarian aid to enter the besieged territory.

 

By Groundxero

Dec 01, 2023

 

The seven-day truce between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas which runs Gaza is over. Israel has launched a series of airstrikes after the temporary pause in war expired this morning at 5am. Till writing of this report, the Palestine Health Ministry reported, over 100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed in Israeli strikes and several hundred wounded, after an agreement could not be reached on prolonging the truce.

 

Injuries among innocent civilians were reported as a result of the Israeli occupation bombing of a house in Yabna refugee camp in Rafah. A 9-year-old Palestinian boy Adam al-Ghoul was shot dead by an Israeli sniper in Jenin, north of the occupied West Bank. Massive destruction has been reported in the Bureij camp in the Gaza Strip after today’s Israeli airstrikes. The halt in fighting began a week ago, on November 24. It initially lasted for four days, and then was extended for several days with the help of Qatar and fellow mediator Egypt.

Israeli military today issued a statement saying that it had resumed bombings in the Gaza Strip, accusing Hamas of breaching the terms of the truce by firing into Israeli territory. An Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy said that Hamas “will now take the mother of all thumpings” after the truce expired and hostilities resumed. “Unfortunately, Hamas decided to terminate the pause by failing to release all the kidnapped women,” the government spokesperson told a briefing. Levy said Hamas was still holding 137 hostages, 10 of them aged 75 or older.

 

Hamas on the other hand said the blame for failure to agree to a truce extension lies with Israel which had “persistently” rejected offers of hostage releases. 

 

Israel resumed bombing Gaza within minutes of the truce formally expiring. The bombing was most intense in Khan Younis and Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been sheltering from earlier bombings in the north.

 

Residents reported that Israel has dropped leaflets on eastern areas of the main southern city Khan Younis asking residents of four towns to evacuate – not to other areas in Khan Younis as in the past, but further south to the crowded town of Rafah on the Egyptian border. The leaflets, written in Arabic, said: You have to evacuate immediately and go to the shelters in the Rafah area. Khan Younis is a dangerous fighting zone. You have been warned.

The leaflets and airstrikes in the south signaled that Israel is now preparing to widen its offensive in Gaza, which has so far focused largely on the northern part of the Strip. Hundreds of thousands of people fled northern Gaza earlier in the war, with many taking shelter in Khan Younis and other cities in the south. The bombing of southern parts of the strip herald an expansion of the war into areas Israel had previously described as safe.

 

Hamas armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, have claimed rocket attack on Israel’s biggest city, where air raid sirens sounded today. The Lebanese armed group Hezbollah also targeted Israeli soldiers at army posts. Reports suggest that a mother and her son were killed by Israeli army shelling in the Lebanese town of Hula. The Israeli army said five members of its security forces have been wounded due to a mortar strike around the southern community of Nirim.

 

Gaza had 2.3 million residents before Israel began bombardment and ground invasion in response to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, when Israel says Hamas gunmen killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages. Palestinian health authorities that the U.N. deems credible has reported more than 15,000 Gazans have been confirmed killed and thousands more are missing and feared buried under rubble, since October 7. At least 1.8 million people from Gaza have been displaced so far by Israeli bombing, a majority of them having moved to the south. That means the south of the narrow strip is now so overcrowded that there is a danger that resumed airstrikes and a ground assault in the south from Israel might leave the people of Gaza with no option but to try to force their way across the border fence into Egypt. From the beginning of the war, Egypt, wary of Israel’s’ plan of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and forcing them out of Gaza into the Sinai deserts has been warning that it would not accept any refugees.

 

The temporary truce has created conditions for the release of hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian captives and allowed additional—but still inadequate—humanitarian aid to enter the besieged territory. The entry of food and fuel trucks for the Gaza Strip at Egypt’s Rafah crossing halted today as Israel resumed its bombings. Rafah has been the only entry point for humanitarian relief destined for Gaza, with deliveries beginning on October 21.

 

The United Nations said it deeply regretted the resumption of deadly hostilities in the Gaza Strip on Friday following the end of a truce between Israel and Hamas, calling the situation “catastrophic”. Its human rights chief, Volker Türk, said he was worried by comments from Israeli politicians and military leaders which indicated that the military operations could be expanded.

 

The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) on Friday appealed for a lasting ceasefire to be implemented in Gaza, describing inaction as “an approval of the killing of children” after a week-old truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed. James Elder, spokesperson for UNICEF warned  that “the humanitarian situation in Gaza is so perilous that anything other than sustained peace and at-scale emergency aid will mean catastrophe for the children of Gaza.” Elder said that the airstrikes, including one that landed 50 meters away from a hospital in Gaza, showed that it is a “war on children”.

Robert Mardini, director general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told Agence France-Presse that the resumption of bombing drags Gazans “back to the nightmarish situation they were in before the truce took place,” with millions of people in desperate need of food, medicine, clean water, and sanitary living conditions. Aid groups and the United Nations say only a small fraction of health facilities in the devastated enclave are still functioning and those are in no shape to handle a new wave of casualties.

 

Egypt is exerting utmost efforts to reinstate the truce in Gaza as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers union in the US has also joined global calls for an end to the fighting in Gaza. Brandon Mancilla, a regional director for the union, announced its support for a ceasefire on X.

 The latest attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza come after USA has reportedly urged Netanyahu to do more to protect civilians in Gaza during a meeting on Thursday, but the Israeli government has repeatedly brushed aside public and private concerns expressed by the Biden administration, which continues to provide unconditional support for the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Netanyahu’s office said on Friday that Israel “is committed to achieving the goals of the war: Releasing the hostages, eliminating Hamas and ensuring that Gaza never again constitutes a threat to the residents of Israel.”

 

Cover Image: An Israeli bombing caused a massive destruction in Jabalia camp, Gaza. Source : Quds News Network

 

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