Israel continues its ferocious attack on Gaza as regional tension escalates in the Middle East

As the war in Gaza reaches its 99th day, tension inside and outside the Palestinian territory does not cease. Without any hint of a ceasefire, the Israeli army continued its attacks by land and air throughout the entire Gaza Strip, which left at least 135 dead in the last day according to reports from the enclave's health authorities.

The spokesman for the Gaza Ministry of Health, Ashraf Al-Qidra, confirmed that Israeli bombings also injured 312 people in the past 24 hours.

According to the same ministry, controlled by Hamas, 23,843 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, when the escalation of this conflict began after Hamas carried out an armed incursion into Israel, leaving 1,200 dead. The conflict between Israel and Hamas has been going on for 75 years.

“The crimes of genocide committed by the Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip make this war the most criminal and bloody in history. One in twenty Gazans is a martyr, injured or missing,” the Hamas-controlled ministry said in its statement. .

Despite Israel claiming to have militarily “dismantled” the Palestinian armed group in the north of the territory, fighting continued in the capital Gaza City, where 20 civilian casualties were reported, according to local authorities.

However, while waiting for Israel materialize your announced Withdrawal from the northern area of ​​the besieged strip, the military offensive is now directed towards the center and south of Gaza.

Specifically, the Government of Gaza denounced that Israeli troops launched a “ring of fire” with “intense and ferocious bombardments” in residential neighborhoods in the southeastern Khan Younis, a southern city that Hamas maintains as a stronghold.

For its part, Rafah, the border city with Egypt through which insufficient humanitarian aid has entered, was also the target of the Israeli air fury and the Gazan authorities affirm that an attack was recorded on a house where internally displaced people were taking refuge, which left a balance of 10 dead.

The Palestinian news agency Wafa also reported attacks in the center of the Gaza Strip, on the Nuseirat and Maghazi refugee camps. “Israeli warplanes also bombed several houses in the Al-Dawa neighborhood of Nuseirat, in the center of the Strip, killing dozens of people and wounding others, and there are still people missing under the rubble,” he said. the middle.

In parallel, Wafa noted that Israel cut off communications in the Palestinian territory for the seventh time since October:

The technical communications teams were directly attacked by Israeli aviation while carrying out their work, despite prior coordination with international institutions.

The Palestinian Red Crescent spoke along the same lines, the humanitarian organization that stated that it had requested contact with its teams on the ground and whose limited scope for action makes rescue work and transfer of the injured difficult.

The Ministry of Health stated, picks up 'Al Jazeera', that to date there are only six ambulances operational in the entire Gaza Strip. “We continue to have difficulties operating some essential services, such as intensive care units and daycare centers,” the entity stated.

Israel kills three teenagers in occupied West Bank

The war tension also moved on Friday night to the occupied West Bank, the other Palestinian territory. There, Israeli troops killed three teenagers who had allegedly previously attacked an Israeli settlement in the area of ​​the city of Hebron, in the south of the territory, by shooting.

This was confirmed by the Israeli military institution: “There was a terrorist infiltration in the community of Adora, the assailants shot at Israeli soldiers who were patrolling the area.” According to the military, “intensive searches were carried out in the area.”

“During the searches carried out by the military in the area, they neutralized the three attackers in the area near the community shortly after the shooting. In addition, an M-16 rifle, an axe, knives and additional weapons were found on the attackers” says the official statement published by EFE.

On the other hand, the Palestinian Wafa agency published that “the occupation closed the entrances to the Palestinian cities of Idhna and Tarqumiyah after the shooting and widely deployed its forces in the vicinity of the Adora colony” and that “its troops also fired flares” .

The occupied West Bank is currently experiencing its highest peak of violence since the Second Intifada.

So far in 2024 there have already been 28 deaths from Israeli fire, according to the Palestinian National Authority, which also stated that since Hamas violently penetrated Israeli soil on October 7, the administrative capital of the Palestinians has added more. of 350 dead, 3,500 injured and more than 2,300 detained.

The wave of support for the Palestinian people was present again on the streets of several cities around the world, this Saturday, January 13, including London, the capital of the United Kingdom; Amman, the Jordanian capital, or Islamabad, in Pakistan.

The escalation between the Houthis of Yemen, the United States and the United Kingdom increases the risk of war in the region

After two days of US bombings on Yemeni military positions in retaliation for attacks by that country's Shiite Houthi rebels in the Red Sea, regional unrest is growing in the Middle East.

This Saturday, Iraq, Lebanon and the Taliban in Afghanistan rejected the attacks by the North American power in Yemen and warned that the risk of the conflict in Gaza being extrapolated to the rest of the region is increasingly high. Abdellatif Rashid, President of Iraq, through a message from the Presidency on X, said:

We strongly denounce attempts to expand the war, and affirm that fiery adventures, in this case, can burn us all

For its part, Lebanon's Foreign Ministry issued a statement expressing its “extreme concern over the latest escalation, military operations in the Red Sea and aerial bombardments against Yemeni territory.” Furthermore, he added that “not addressing the true reasons for this escalation, that is, the global ceasefire of the Israeli offensive and the war against Gaza, can expand the circle of conflict as has already begun to happen recently.”

Government de facto of Afghanistan, led by the Taliban, also joined the rejection of the American and British attacks on Yemeni soil. “From supporting Israeli crimes to attacking Yemen, all these actions are inhumane, provocative and a direct aggression against Muslim nations,” and they called for “putting aside their petty differences in these critical times and fulfilling their obligations towards the oppressed” as a single united Muslim people.

The United Kingdom and the United States are leading large-scale military maneuvers against the Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen, allies of Iran, with the aim of weakening their offensive capacity against commercial ships in the Red Sea.

Since November of last year, this Yemeni rebel group has launched dozens of attacks against merchant ships in the Red Sea seeking to harm the Israeli economy in response to its “indiscriminate attack on the Gaza Strip.”

From the United Kingdom, the head of the Defense portfolio, Grant Shapps, said in an interview with British media 'Daily Telegraph' that Iran must use its regional influence and de-escalate:

You must get these different organizations to stop because the world is running out of patience.

The UN, for its part, said this Saturday through a statement from the head of the organization's mission in Yemen, Hans Grundberg, that recent events undermine the peace attempts in which the country has been immersed since the beginning of its conflict. civilian in 2014. The attacks have an “adverse impact on peace efforts in Yemen and stability and security in the region.”

In recent weeks, maritime traffic in the Red Sea has suffered alterations due to the Houthi maritime offensive, an extreme that has caused delays and additional costs in a navigation that now passes through the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and adds ten more days. route in Euro-Asian trade.

So far, nothing indicates a cessation on this other front of hostilities, as Yemen's Houthi rebels have already threatened reprisals against British and American targets.

With EFE, Reuters and local media