About 50 people, including many children, were killed and many others injured tonight by new air raids by the Israeli army on the Gaza Strip, according to Palestinian sources cited by local media. In the southern city of Rafah at least 27 people were killed in two separate attacks on residential buildings, the Wafa news agency reported. Another 18 people lost their lives in a bombing in the Al Zawaida area and seven in the Al Zaytoun neighborhood. Three people, including a 6-year-old boy, were killed in another raid in the northern part of the Strip. According to Wafa, the number of victims is expected to increase and several people are still trapped in the rubble of the bombed buildings.
“Hamas terrorists are modern-day Nazis. The only solution Hamas wants is the final solution, the elimination of the Jews.” Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan said this at the emergency meeting of the Security Council. “The brutality of the savage Nazis of Hamas is not the only similarity with the Nazis” during the Second World War, “Hamas wants to exterminate the Jews like the Nazis,” he added: “as with the rise to power of Nazism, the world is silent.”
“Gaza is hell on earth, saving humanity from hell today means for the UN saving the Palestinians in Gaza. Virtually all our people in the Strip are homeless, displaced, and they are nowhere safe.” This was stated by the Palestinian ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour while speaking at the emergency meeting of the Security Council. “How many more days will you wait to say enough? To recognize that it is a war against our children while you are still paralyzed?” he asked. “The General Assembly has called for a humanitarian truce and it must happen immediately,” he added, accusing the CDS of not acting.
“We are paying for your failure. Free us, free everyone now, now!”. Anger against Benyamin Netanyahu is shouted by one of the three female hostages of whom Hamas released a video today and which shocked Israel and the world. Her words that come from the bottom of an unknown hiding place in the Strip. “Cruel psychological propaganda on the part of Hamas”, she branded it shortly after the prime minister, ruling out a ceasefire.
The militiamen’s move came as the Israeli army, from the bridgehead in the north of the Strip, advanced with troops and tanks to the outskirts of Gaza City. A progression of men and vehicles that went, according to local sources, to the eastern part of the Sajaya district, a stone’s throw from the capital of the Palestinian enclave. And they hit, before retreating, Sallah-a-din, the main artery that cuts through the entire Strip. A slow and inexorable attrition of Hamas’ positions, as explained by military spokesman Daniel Hagari: “We have extended our activity inside Gaza, increasing the forces involved.” A maneuver that Netanyahu described as “the third phase of the war”, with the army “advancing in a measured but powerful manner”. Because, Netanyahu insisted, “the ground operation” is the only way to bring the hostages home.
A belief strengthened by the liberation, by the army and the Shin Bet, of the soldier Ori Magidish, one of the 239 hostages, kidnapped last October 7 in the Nahal Oz kibbutz, where she was a lookout. A “targeted” operation prepared for days after the intelligence had obtained information on the place of her imprisonment in Gaza. However, the success achieved does not seem to be able to compensate for the shock of the video of the three hostages, which Israeli TV reported but did not broadcast. The identity of the three women was made known by the prime minister himself: Yelena Tropanov (of kibbutz Nir Oz), Danielle Alloni and Rimon Kirscht (of kibbutz Nirim), who saw their loved ones killed or kidnapped in the attack of three weeks ago. “We pay for your political, security and military failure. There was no army – Alloni shouted – there was no one, no one protected us. Now we are prisoners here… provided that there are no conditions “You kill us. Do you want to kill us all? Do you want the army to kill us? Isn’t it enough that Israeli citizens have been killed? Free their citizens and prisoners now. Free us: now, now, now!”, urged the woman, asking to to accept the prisoner exchange proposed by Hamas.
An accusation to which the prime minister obviously did not respond, however clarifying in a press conference in Tel Aviv that there will be no exchange and no ceasefire. “There is a time for peace and a time for war. Now it is time for war. We did not want it but we will carry it out until victory”, thundered Netanyahu, rejecting any hypothesis of resignation. “The only one I want to resign – he answered a question from journalists – is Hamas, we will force them to resign, to give up their objectives, it is my responsibility and I will continue to lead my country” into war.
The families of the three hostages instead reacted to the video by launching an appeal to Western leaders. “I ask President Biden – said one of them – to do everything possible to bring them home. Time is passing but it is not late to bring them back”.
On the ground, the military strategy, explained the army spokesperson, remains that of “combined land-sea-air actions”. With attacks that have increased exponentially in recent days, hitting over 650 targets in Gaza: weapons depots, anti-tank missile launch sites (including near Al-Azhar University), underground hideouts and bases Hamas training camp. The police instead announced that they had identified the bodies of 1,135 killed Israelis: 823 civilians and 312 soldiers. Among them also the Israeli with a German passport Shani Louk, 22 years old, kidnapped in the Reim rave and massacred as shown by some videos.
In the Strip the situation is collapsing and certainly the humanitarian aid that manages to trickle in is not enough. Today 40 trucks entered the Rafah crossing but in the evening the White House announced that the objective is to have at least one hundred pass through it a day. The deaths (Hamas authorities do not distinguish between civilians and fighters) have reached 8,306, of which 3,457 are “minors”. The injured are over 21,000.
Read the full article on ANSA.it
2023-10-31 04:00:00
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