The attacks of the last three days have claimed the lives of 31 Palestinians in the Strip, six of them children.
Three days after Israel launched operation ‘Dawn’ in a “preventive” manner against possible retaliation for the arrest of a leader of Islamic Jihad in the West Bank, calm would be about to return to Gaza. This has been advanced this Sunday by the Egyptian authorities, who have acted as mediators in a ceasefire agreement between the Tel Aviv Army and the terrorist group, which is expected to come into force at 8:00 in the afternoon, local time. If confirmed, the pact would be the end of the hostilities that since Friday have claimed the lives of 31 people in the Strip, six of them children.
The consensus between the parties, as revealed by the newspaper ‘Haaretz’, would include Israeli concessions to alleviate the fuel shortage in the Gaza Strip. An extremely serious situation that the Ministry of Health of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which governs the Strip, had warned this Sunday about, assuring that the enclave’s hospitals were going to run out of the necessary fuel to power their emergency generators in within 48 hours. The reason: the closure on Saturday of the only power plant in Gaza due to the blockade that preceded its campaign of attacks by the Jewish state against Islamic Jihad.
The possible truce would take place after a few last hours of extreme convulsion, in which the Armed Forces of the Jewish State continued with the siege while the terrorist group launched 400 projectiles – between rockets and mortar shells – against Israeli soil. The Army detailed that 97% of the artifacts were, however, intercepted by the anti-missile shield. But this did not prevent scenes of panic and chaos in cities such as Tel Aviv, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Sderot and Jerusalem, where dozens of people had to be treated for bruises as they fled to shelters.
The warning sirens that sounded for the first time in Jerusalem since the last outbreak of violence broke out on Friday unleashed fears on a day in which hundreds of Israelis commemorated a Jewish holiday in the holy city, with the visit of nationalists to the Esplanade of the mosques, known in Judaism as the ‘Temple Mount’. On the other side, in Gaza, the Israeli Armed Forces meanwhile detained some twenty members of the Islamic Jihad in the West Bank, in addition to another 20 arrested on Saturday.
Another ringleader executed
The terrorist organization confirmed, for its part, the death of the group’s leader in the south of the Strip, Khaled Mansour, in an airstrike in Tel Aviv on Saturday night. This execution and that of Taysir al Jabari ‘Abu Mahmud’, one of the main leaders of Jihad, killed on Friday in Gaza, have been some of the reasons put forward by the head of Israel’s Internal Intelligence and General Security Services (Shin Bet), Ronen Bar, for the Government to agree to the truce.
In Bar’s opinion, the ‘Dawn’ operation would have achieved more advantages than expected, especially the “strategic objective” of opening a gap between the terrorist group and Hamas, which has remained relatively silent during the confrontation. Instead, delaying the campaign could undo that achievement and lead to a bloody scenario, like the eleven-day war in May 2021, in which 260 people died on the Palestinian side and 14 in Israel. It is about, he insisted, “avoiding possible mistakes that could lead to a broader conflict that Tel Aviv does not want.”
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