After a week of truce, the war has returned. Despite the last-minute efforts of the mediators, the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas expired this Friday at seven in the morning (one hour less in mainland Spain) without an announcement of extension. Shortly before, anti-aircraft alarms sounded near Gaza due to the launch of a rocket, intercepted by the anti-missile shield, according to the Israeli army. Israeli planes have resumed the bombings with force, causing at least 32 deaths, both in the north and in the south of Gaza, where the vast majority of its inhabitants are crowded after the forced displacement from the north, the hardest hit part. . The air raid sirens have sounded a dozen times in southern Israel due to the launch of projectiles from the Strip.
The first plumes of smoke in Gaza are visible from the Israeli city of Sderot, just a kilometer from the Strip. The Israeli army attacks by air and with tanks. In addition to the F-16s and combat helicopters, drones fly above the area. At the same time, the projectiles that are part of the Israeli air defense system known as Iron Dome, fly through the sky over Sderot to intercept the missiles leaving the Strip.
Shortly after the end of the deadline, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement in which he accused “the terrorist organization Hamas-ISIS” of having breached the agreement. “He has not fulfilled his obligation to free all the women today and has launched rockets against Israeli citizens,” he assured before underlining his “commitment” to the three objectives of the war: “freeing the hostages, eliminating Hamas and ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to the residents of Israel.”
Hamas has also sent a defiant message. “What Israel did not achieve in the 50 days before the truce, it will not achieve by continuing its aggression after the truce,” a member of Hamas’s political branch, Ezzat Al Rashq, warned on the group’s website.
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US warning
A few hours earlier, on Thursday night, the Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken, had issued a warning with overtones of reprimand to his Israeli ally regarding the possibility of breaking the agreement. While the other two mediators, Qatar and Egypt, tried to hammer out two more days of truce, the head of American diplomacy considered “it is essential that Israel act in accordance with international humanitarian laws and the laws of war” and stressed that “it does not cannot be repeated” in the south the “massive loss of civilian lives” nor the “scale displacement” that occurred in the north. The northern part of the Strip has been turned into rubble and the majority of its 1.1 million inhabitants have fled to southern Gaza, following Israeli orders and in the face of the intensity of the bombings and subsequent invasion.
Blinken left Israel this Friday, ending his fourth visit since the war began. On this occasion he met in Jerusalem with Netanyahu and Israeli President Isaac Herzog. He also met in the West Bank city of Ramallah with the president of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), Mahmoud Abbas.
There are still 137 hostages in the Strip
Israel managed to bring back eight hostages on Thursday in the seventh of the exchanges, while it released 30 Palestinian prisoners: 22 minors and eight women. In this way, around 137 kidnapped people remain in the Strip, although in the last hours the death of five of them was announced, among whom – according to Hamas – is Shiri Bibas, 32 years old, mother of Ariel, four, and Kfir, 10 months old. Hamas had announced on Wednesday the death of the three due to a bombing. Yarden, Shiri’s husband and father of the children, remains alive in Hamas hands. He has appeared in a video asking his country to accept the three bodies that the fundamentalist movement wants to give him to be buried in Israel. The authorities of this country are trying to verify if they are dead or not.
The Bedouin community, traditionally forgotten by Israeli governments, welcomed the release of two of their six hostages among those eight. They are siblings Aisha and Bilal Zyadna, aged 16 and 18, whose father, Yousef, and another brother, Hamza, aged 22, remain kidnapped.
The 24 hours of truce achieved in extremis In the early hours of Thursday they not only served to carry out a new exchange of hostages for prisoners and to give the population of Gaza a little more time to stock up on the possibility of the return of the bombings. Also so that the negotiating teams, almost always behind the scenes, would push the parties in conflict towards a new extension, this time for two days, so as not to have to negotiate again against the clock during Friday, a festive day for Muslims and which begins at fall. the sun of sabbath Jew.
Shortly after it was announced on Thursday morning that the truce had been extended for another day, two armed Hamas members attacked a group of Israelis waiting at a bus stop in Jerusalem. They killed three of them before being shot down. The attack did not alter the ceasefire, but it did serve to make Netanyahu assure that this “is the same Hamas that perpetrated the terrible massacre of October 7 and that is trying to assassinate us everywhere.”
Despite the relief of the week that has passed without Israeli attacks in Gaza, the United Nations warned that the 2.3 million inhabitants of the Strip need much more health care than before the war, which has reduced the hospital capacity of the Palestinian enclave to a third of what it had, according to the director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. From Jordan, King Abdullah urged the UN and international humanitarian organizations to increase pressure on Israel to provide more aid to the Gaza Strip, as confirmed by a source present at a meeting with the monarch to the Reuters agency.
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