US-Israel rift seen possible over Palestinians after war
As southern Gaza continues to be bombarded
PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES: Israel ratcheted up its attacks in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and United States President Joe Biden discussed differences over a postwar future for Palestinians that have suggested a rift between the two allies.
Witnesses said the Israeli bombardment was again focused overnight on Khan Younis, the largest city in the south of the Hamas-controlled territory, although Palestinian media also reported intense fire around Jabalia in the north early on Saturday.
Biden and Netanyahu held their first call since December 23, a day after the Israeli premier reiterated his rejection of any form of Palestinian sovereignty, deepening divisions with Israel’s key backer over the war.
While the two leaders spoke of what might come next, the reality of the war was all too clear in Khan Younis and elsewhere in the Hamas-controlled enclave.
A child with a bloodied face cried on a gurney at Al-Nasser hospital in Khan Younis while ambulances carrying the wounded and the dead arrived to the sound of automatic weapons in the distance.
The conflict began with Hamas’ deadly attacks on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of about 1,140 people, mostly civilians, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas in response, and its air and ground offensive has killed at least 24,762 Palestinians, about 70 percent of them women, young children and adolescents, Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry said.
Netanyahu has said Israel expects the war to continue for months, but his comments on Thursday rejecting a so-called two-state solution suggested a rift with the US.
Biden said after Friday’s call with Netanyahu, with whom he has had a complicated relationship over some 40 years, that it was possible the Israeli leader might still come around.
“There are a number of types of twostate solutions. There’s a number of countries that are members of the UN that ... don’t have their own militaries,” Biden told reporters after an event at the White House. “And so, I think there’s ways in which this could work.”
Netanyahu said on Thursday Israel “must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River,” which “contradicts the idea of [Palestinian] sovereignty.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had said in the ski resort town of Davos in eastern Switzerland a day earlier that Israel could not achieve “genuine security” without a “pathway to a Palestinian state.”
Famine, disease
Biden has stood firmly behind Israel since the October 7 attacks, although he has also warned that Israel could lose support by “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza.
The UN says the war has displaced roughly 85 percent of Gaza’s people and warns better aid access is sorely needed as famine and disease loom.
The White House also said after Friday’s call that Israel would allow flour shipments for Palestinians through its port of Ashdod.
Nearly 20,000 babies have been born “in hell” in the Gaza Strip since the start of the Israeli offensive, the UN Children’s Fund said on Friday.
A week-long communications blackout in Gaza has amplified the challenges, although the Telecommunications Ministry and operator Palestine Telecommunications Co. said internet services were starting to return on Friday.
Israel’s military offensive has moved further south in Gaza as the conflict has progressed.
Metawei Nabil, recently released by Israeli forces and bearing scars on his arms, told AFP he fled the city of Beit Lahia in northern Gaza, only “to face death” in the devastated southern city of Rafah, near the Egyptian border.
Some residents who fled the initial stages of the war in northern Gaza have begun returning to what remains of their homes.
In Gaza City’s Rimal district, “everything is destroyed, and the people are dying of hunger,” said Ibrahim Saada, who told AFP he lost his whole family.
Groups of isolated fighters still confront troops in northern Gaza despite the Israeli military saying this month Hamas’ combat structures in the north had been dismantled.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 90 people were killed in Israeli “attacks” across the territory overnight.