ISRAEL RESCHEDULES U.S. TALKS
Rift between Israel, US growing over plans for ground offensive in packed Rafah
BATTLES and bombardment pounded the Gaza Strip yesterday, after Washington said Israel agreed to reschedule cancelled talks with tensions worsening between the allies.
United States criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has mounted over Gaza’s civilian death toll, dire food shortages and Israeli plans to push its ground offensive against Hamas into the southern city of Rafah packed with displaced civilians.
World leaders warned against a Rafah offensive, which they fear would worsen the catastrophic humanitarian situation for the territory’s 2.4 million residents.
The United Nations reported on Wednesday that famine “is ever closer to becoming a reality in northern Gaza”, and said the territory’s health system is collapsing “due to ongoing hostilities and access constraints”.
Bombardment and fighting have continued despite a binding UN Security Council resolution passed on Monday demanding an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza and the release of hostages.
Netanyahu scrapped an Israeli visit to Washington to discuss the Rafah plan in protest of the UN ceasefire resolution from which the US abstained, allowing it to pass. Netanyahu’s government has since backtracked and agreed “to reschedule the meeting dedicated to Rafah”, said White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre.
US officials had said they plan to present Israel with an alternative for Rafah, focused on striking Hamas targets while limiting the civilian toll.
The war began when Hamas launched an unprecedented Oct 7 attack that resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians,
according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Hamas took about 250 hostages. Israel had said after an earlier truce and hostage release deal, about 130 captives remain in Gaza, including 34 presumed dead.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed at least 32,490 people, most of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.
The Ministry, in a preliminary toll issued early yesterday, said 66 people were killed overnight.
HOSPITALS STILL SURROUNDED
Fighting continued near three of the Strip’s hospitals, raising fears for patients, medical staff and displaced people in them.
The Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, near Rafah, “has ceased to function completely”, the Palestine Red Crescent said earlier this week, following the evacuation of civilians from the medical centre.
Israel’s military accuses Hamas of hiding in medical facilities and using civilians as shields.
Early yesterday, the Israeli army said fighters had been firing on troops “from within and outside” the emergency ward at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
Troops began raiding Al-Shifa
last week and on Wednesday night carried out an airstrike on the emergency ward “while avoiding harm to civilians, patients, and medical teams”, the army said.
The UN had reported “intensive exchanges of fire between the Israeli military and armed Palestinians”. It cited the Health Ministry as saying the Israeli army had confined medical staff and patients to one building, not allowing them to leave.
Israel’s army said troops had evacuated civilians, patients and staff “to alternative medical facilities” it set up.
Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles also massed around Nasser Hospital, the Health Ministry said, adding shots were fired, but no raid had yet been launched.
The Red Crescent warned that thousands were trapped inside.
Gaza has endured almost six months of war and a siege that has cut off most food, water, fuel and other supplies.
Israel denies it is blocking food trucks, but aid entering the Gaza Strip by land is far below pre-war levels — about 150 vehicles a day compared with at least 500 before the war, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
With limited ground access,
several nations began aid airdrops and a sea corridor from Cyprus delivered its first cargo of food.
But UN agencies said they were no substitute for land deliveries.
Desperate crowds have rushed towards aid packages drifting down on parachutes. Hamas on Tuesday said 18 people drowned or died in stampedes trying to recover airdropped aid.
FORMER HOSTAGE CLAIMS SEXUAL ASSAULT
Israel charged that Palestinian fighters sexually assaulted Oct 7 victims and hostages.
The New York Times published the account of the first Israeli woman to speak publicly about having been sexually abused, 40year-old lawyer Amit Soussana.
Soussana, who was abducted from her home and released in November, said she was repeatedly beaten and sexually assaulted at gunpoint by her guard inside Gaza.
Soussana told the US newspaper she was abducted from Kfar Aza near the Gaza border and taken to the Hamas-ruled territory, where one of her captors forced her “to commit a sexual act on him”.
“He sat me on the edge of the bath. And I closed my legs. And I resisted. And he kept punching me and put his gun in my face,” she told the Times. “Then he dragged me to the bedroom.”
Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel said on X that Soussana’s “heart-wrenching testimony compels the world to act”.
“The Israeli government and world governments must do whatever it takes to bring home” the remaining hostages, it said.
Talks in Qatar towards a truce and hostage release deal, involving US and Egyptian mediators, have brought no result so far, halfway through Ramadan.
Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, before meeting visiting Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, stressed that “the number of civilian casualties is far too high, and the amount of humanitarian aid is far too low” in Gaza.
US criticism has mounted, but President Joe Biden has made clear he will not use his key point of leverage — cutting US military assistance to Israel, which totals to billions of dollars.
SCHOOL BUS HIT IN WEST BANK
Alongside the bloodiest-ever Gaza war, violence has surged in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where medics and the army said three people were wounded in a gun attack yesterday that targeted a school bus.
After reports that a fighter fired towards “a number of vehicles”, Israeli soldiers were sent to the scene near the town of Al-Auja, the military said, confirming a school bus was targeted.
A 30-year-old man was in serious condition with gunshot wounds, while a 21-year-old man was less seriously wounded and a 13-year-old boy suffered shrapnel injuries, emergency services said.
Israeli public radio said the masked gunman started shooting at Israeli cars about 7am, hitting a car and a school bus.
The war in Gaza has raised fears of wider regional conflict, particularly along the Israeli-Lebanon border.
Lebanon’s Hizbollah movement on Wednesday announced the deaths of eight of its members after a day of cross-border fire with Israel that left at least 16 people dead.