RAMADAN DEADLINE FOR GAZA

Israel will invade Rafah if hostages are not freed by start of fasting month

ISRAEL has threatened to invade Gaza’s Rafah by the start of Ramadan if Hamas does not return the remaining hostages by then, despite international pressure to protect Palestinian civilians sheltering in the southern city.

With prospects for truce talks dimmed, the United States and other governments, as well as the United Nations, have issued increasingly urgent appeals to Israel to call off its planned offensive on Rafah.

The Israeli government says the city on the Egypt border is the last remaining stronghold in Gaza of the Palestinian group Hamas.

But it is also where three-quarters of the displaced Palestinian population has fled, taking shelter in sprawling tent encampments without access to adequate food, water or medicine.

“The world must know, and Hamas leaders must know — if by Ramadan our hostages are not home, the fighting will continue everywhere, including the Rafah area,” Benny Gantz, a retired military chief of staff, told a conference of American Jewish leaders in Jerusalem on Sunday.

“Hamas have a choice. They can surrender, release the hostages and the civilians of Gaza can celebrate Ramadan,” added Gantz, a member of the threeperson war cabinet.

Ramadan is expected to begin around March 10.

Gantz said the offensive would be carried out in coordination with American and Egyptian partners to “minimise the civilian casualties as much as possible”.

But where Palestinians can go after four months of war have flattened vast swathes of the Strip remains unclear.

“There’s no safe place. Even the hospital is not safe,” Ahmad Mohammed Aburizq said from the morgue of a Rafah hospital where mourners gathered around a loved one wrapped in a white body bag.

“That’s my cousin. He was martyred in Al-Mawasi, in the ‘safe area’.

“And my mother was martyred the day before.”

For weeks, international mediators have sought to broker a truce-for-hostages deal that would pause fighting for six weeks.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has played down the possibility of an impending breakthrough, calling Hamas’s demands “delusional”.

Even if a deal is struck, he insists the campaign to eliminate Hamas from Gaza will not be completed until clearing Rafah.

With international pressure piling on Israel, the UN’s top court opened a week of hearings from yesterday examining the legal consequences of the country’s 57year occupation of Palestinian territories.

The hearings, requested by the UN General Assembly, are separate from South Africa’s highprofile case alleging Israel is committing genocide in its current Gaza offensive.

At the UN’s Security Council, the US signalled it would veto the latest UN draft resolution seeking an immediate ceasefire should it come to a vote this week.

Ambassador Linda ThomasGreenfield said the resolution would jeopardise the ongoing truce talks, as well as the broader aim of “an enduring resolution of hostilities”.

On Sunday morning, dozens of Israelis blocked Gaza-bound aid trucks from entering through the Nitzana crossing with Egypt, AFP reporters and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said.

Gazans said they were going so hungry they had to grind animal feed into flour.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said nearly three in four people were drinking contaminated water.

“The speed of deterioration in Gaza is unprecedented,” it said.