«Kfir turns one on Thursday. A third of his life was spent as a prisoner of Hamas.” Thus ends his testimony yesterday in kibbutz Nir Oz, Yosi Shnaider, cousin of Shiri Bibas, the mother of Kfir and Ariel, 4 years old. The kibbutz is the one from which they were kidnapped on October 7th, and since then there has been no news of them.
In the community nursery, where Kfir and Ariel played, a room was set up for the little one's first birthday. Orange balloons, like the color of his hair, then released into the sky.
Sharon Alony Cunio was kidnapped along with her three-year-old twin daughters Yulia and Emma and her husband David. The man is still in Gaza. One of her little girls was separated from her mother for about ten days, who did not know where she was. Yesterday the woman returned to the remains of her house. All burned, destroyed. «Here – he shows the journalists – there was the sofa where the girls played. My daughters had to do their business in the sink and garbage can for 52 days. There were days when I had nothing to give them to eat and they would cry their eyes out, their voices weak from hunger as they screamed for food.”
Sharon cries, thinking of her husband still in Gaza. «I'm not willing to give up the love of my life. I want David and the other 135 hostages to return to us today.”
A little further away, there is the house of Amiram Kalvo, 85 years old, the oldest of the hostages in Gaza. His wife Nurit was freed. Son Srulik says his father and others on the kibbutz often helped children and women in Gaza, hosting them, providing care, even transporting them to hospitals.
“The hostages must return before they die, and they are dying every day,” he says. On what remains of the front door of Oded Lifshitz, 83, a hostage in Gaza, his nephew Daniel looks towards Khan Yunis. “We can probably even see where he is from here, it's not far away.”
Fighting continues throughout the Gaza Strip and attempts are also made to identify possible locations where hostages in the hands of Hamas are still being held. Israeli troops raided several command posts in Khan Yunis of the group that controls the Strip. The headquarters of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in that area was also targeted. Weapons and equipment seized. From the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis, Hamas launched attacks against the military, with rockets and artillery.
More than 50 rockets were fired from the Strip at the southern city of Netivot, many intercepted by the Iron Dome but some also landed in the city, damaging several buildings but causing no casualties. The attack is one of the biggest in weeks.
The army has discovered that the underground tunnels built by Hamas could extend from a minimum of 560 kilometers to a maximum of approximately 720 kilometers, more than previously thought, considering that the Strip is approximately 40 kilometers long.
The situation of the population in Gaza is increasingly dramatic. Of the 2.3 million people living normally in the Gaza Strip, the UN agency Ocha says that 378,000 are in what is classified as phase 5, or with a catastrophic level of hunger, characterized by an almost total lack of food, and from the exhaustion of coping skills.
There are 939,000 Gazans in the phase 4 emergency level. According to OCHA, nutrition NGOs and other UN agencies will only be able to meet 25% of the nutritional needs of malnourished children and vulnerable mothers in the next two months .
The United Nations blames Israel for not allowing aid to enter. The Jewish country rejects the accusations, stating that the aid arrives, even in abundance, but is partly seized by Hamas and partly fails to reach the population due to the inability of the United Nations to organize deliveries and provide trucks and workforce.
The European Union has meanwhile added Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to its terrorist list. Sinwar's assets in EU member states will be frozen and no economic resources will be made available to him. “The decision is part of the European Union's response to the threat posed by Hamas and its brutal and indiscriminate terrorist attacks against Israel on 7 October 2023,” read an official statement from the Council of the European Union. Already in December, the Council added Hamas military leaders Mohammed Deif and Marwan Issa to the list.
Basel Mahadi, one of the Jihad commanders arrested in Gaza on December 20, told the Shin Bet that he was trained in Iran, along with others from Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, both in the use of weapons and in firing rockets, as well as on guerrilla techniques.
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