Hamas tried to have its militiamen evacuated through the Rafah crossing along with wounded civilians
Hamas tried to get dozens of its militants, wounded in fighting with Israel, to leave through the Rafah crossing, confused among the civilians enrolled in the evacuation operation to Egypt. The authorities in Cairo and the United States detected that at least 25 militiamen had been added to this list, which would have delayed the entire transfer process by forcing the two countries to check that none of the Palestinians with dual nationality concentrated at the gates. Rafah belonged to the Islamist movement.
The intention of the militia, whose political arm governs in Gaza, was that its fighters could leave the Strip and be treated in Egyptian hospitals. Apparently, this is the same tactic that Israel denounced this Friday and Saturday after bombing a medical convoy in the north of the Strip. According to army sources, the fundamentalist organization would have tried to remove some of its wounded from the hospital mixed with civilian patients.
The international community, led by the United Nations, has however condemned this type of indiscriminate attacks by Israeli aviation which, as happened this week in the Jabalia refugee camp, cause death to the civilian population. Several dozen people have lost their lives, in fact, in the bombing of the ambulance convoy this Friday. And the exact number of fatalities in Jabalia is still unknown (the initial figure put the balance at fifty dead and at least 150 injured), although it has been found out that Israel used projectiles weighing a thousand kilos of explosive in that offensive.
One of the most striking images of this attack were the two huge craters left by the bombs in the middle of the Yabalia field. The explanation given by military weapons experts is that both holes, 40 meters in diameter and about five meters deep, were caused by deep-sea missiles intended to destroy Hamas’s underground complexes under the camp. Typically, this type of projectile incorporates a detonator to delay the explosion for a few thousandths of a second once it has penetrated the ground, so that the effect of the shock wave in the subsoil is greater. Tragic consequences are also suffered on the surface, as the devastating power grows significantly.
Regarding Rafah, sources from the US Administration have confessed to ‘The New York Times’ that negotiations on the evacuation of civilians with dual nationality trapped in the south of the Strip have been made impossible for days by Hamas’s refusal to let them leave. to the Palestinians and, later, for imposing a list of names that should be part of this contingent. The Islamist movement would have made “unreasonable” requests and, later, sent to the authorities in Tel Aviv, Cairo and Washington lists of wounded Palestinians who had to be transferred to Egyptian hospitals, many of whom were identified as fundamentalist militiamen.
Of a list of 75 people, at least a third would be combatants, which provoked immediate opposition from the Egyptian authorities, very concerned about the possibility of Islamic terrorists entering their territory taking advantage of the Rafah evacuations. All negotiations lasted days and were carried out with the intermediation of Qatar. Finally, the passage was opened after the militia agreed to remove its militants from the lists.
The other point of concern for those responsible for the operations in Rafah is the possibility that equipment necessary for the fundamentalist movement to remain operational in the face of harassment by the Israeli Defense Forces will enter Gaza. According to ‘The Times of Israel’, two inspectors discovered this week in one of the trucks transporting humanitarian aid several oxygen concentration devices theoretically intended to aerate Hamas passageways. «They were not for use in hospitals, but under them. That’s why they were smuggled between boxes of cookies,” said a commander of the inspection team, who prohibited entry to the vehicle.
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