The United States, Israel’s main ally and weapons supplier in the current conflict, continues to express its discontent regarding the evolution of the war in Gaza, which will enter its third month next Thursday. The divergences with the Israeli authorities are more evident since on Friday the opposing parties ended a week of ceasefire and resumed attacks on the Strip in parallel with the launch of missiles from that territory towards Israel. In the last 24 hours alone, the deaths in the Palestinian enclave have risen to more than 700, according to a spokesman for the local government, in the hands of Hamas, in statements to the Al Jazeera network on Sunday morning.
But the pressure deployed by the United States for that country’s troops to minimize civilian casualties and unblock humanitarian aid is not reflected in the way in which the army has resumed bombing after that period of calm. These take place not only in the southern towns of Khan Younis and Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people pushed by Israel from other areas have been settling, but also in the north, as happened this Sunday in a residential area of the camp Yabalia refugees.
Senior US officials such as Vice President Kamala Harris, who warned that “too many innocent civilians have been murdered,” or Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, for whom the defense of the lives of Palestinian civilians is a “moral responsibility and a mandate.” strategic”, have raised the tone regarding the plans of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The administration led by President Joe Biden has reminded the Israeli president that, in the face of his disruptive idea, the only way out of the race is with the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). This body, according to the White House, must govern the joint designs of the West Bank and Gaza as a single administrative unit that leads to the achievement of its own State along the path of self-determination. During an intervention in California, Austin warned that “urban warfare can only be won by protecting civilians” and also called on Israel to allow access for humanitarian aid, slowed down after the end of the ceasefire.
These differences between allies emerge after the warnings already made by the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, visiting Israel on Friday, a few hours before the truce was blown up. “The magnitude of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating,” Kamala Harris warned from Dubai, where she attended the climate summit. The fatalities in Gaza due to Israeli attacks have almost reached 16,000, two thirds of them minors and women, since the war began on October 7 with the massacre of 1,200 people perpetrated by Hamas in Israeli territory, from where, in addition, took 240 hostages. Only 105 were freed in truce exchanges for Palestinian prisoners. The United States does not doubt Israel’s right to defend itself, to put an end to the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and to bring back all those kidnapped, but, at the same time, as Harris said, it denounces the excessive number of victims who have nothing to do with the armed jihadist movement.
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“More must be done to protect innocent civilians”
In this sense, the vice president added, Israel has the right to attack “military objectives” to put an end to Hamas, but it cannot set aside the international humanitarian legislation that governs armed conflicts, Harris insisted, so “it must do more to protect innocent civilians.” The vice president said that, after the current contest, three must be the pillars of the new regional reality. On the one hand, reconstruction, focused on homes, hospitals, electrical installations or water supply, all seriously damaged during the Israeli military operation. Second, security, of which ANP agents with possible international support must be a part, although never with “the terrorists” of Hamas. And third, the Government, which must be headed by a revitalized ANP that is allowed to govern the designs of the West Bank and Gaza as a single administrative unit.
Kamala Harris acknowledged that she maintains contacts with the emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, to achieve a new truce, but, for the moment, there are no signs that the main mediating countries (Qatar, Egypt and the United States) are going to achieve it. . Netanyahu withdrew his team from Qatar on Saturday due to the apparent lack of results.
“Canceling negotiations is a classic negotiation tactic,” says Hershon Baskin, who has participated on the Israeli side in previous negotiations with Hamas. “Negotiations will continue. (…) Hamas demands a higher price. Israel needs to make difficult decisions,” he points out through his X account. Israel would be trying to include new categories of hostages in the list of those left to be released, such as elderly men or female soldiers, according to sources cited by the diary Haaretz. The jihadist movement, for its part, is pressing to raise the level of release of detainees in Israeli prisons and gain time with a new ceasefire, according to one of its political leaders, Saleh Al Aruri, from Lebanon in an interview with Al Jazeera.
Without referring to the hundreds of civilian casualties reported by Gaza authorities, the Israeli military said it had eliminated five Hamas “terrorists” in a drone strike and that its planes and helicopters, from the air, and its ships from the sea, they continued to hit its infrastructure of tunnels and weapons warehouses. In total, since the beginning of the war, they have discovered 800 tunnels and destroyed 500.
The Arabic spokesman for the troops, Avichay Adraee, published on the social network If they don’t want to suffer the same fate. Previously, he warned residents of six southern areas to stay away due to the risk of being victims of bombings. As on previous occasions, the army disguises its threats with euphemisms such as “we invite you to move to the well-known shelters for internally displaced people,” according to Adraee’s post.
As already happened in the north, the new Israeli offensive after the ceasefire is increasing pressure on hospitals in the south of the Palestinian Mediterranean enclave, where “conditions are more than inadequate, unimaginable for the provision of medical care,” said this Sunday the director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on his account on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
In the Nassar hospital (Khan Yunis) alone, the 1,000 patients that the facilities house triple the capacity for which they are designed, according to the team from this UN agency that traveled there on Saturday. They are joined by all the citizens, many of them displaced from other places in the Strip, who seek refuge and who occupy “every corner” while, around them, “patients are treated on the ground amid cries of pain.”
Inside that hospital, “everywhere you go, there are children with third-degree burns, shrapnel wounds, brain injuries and broken bones,” describes James Elder, spokesperson for Unicef, who also speaks to Al Jazeera of “mothers crying for children who seem to be hours away from death.” In his Instagram social network profile, where one of those burned minors appears, he assures that “today the war against children is more intense than ever.” That boy is Mohamed, nine years old, who before the war was the best student in his class, according to one of the images that he publishes with his diploma next to the one that shows him admitted to a bed at the Nassar hospital. “His entire family has been murdered,” Elder adds.
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