This Tuesday, the Israeli army intensified the harshness of its bombings on the Gaza Strip and killed two leaders of Hamas, the armed Islamist organization that caused at least 900 deaths on Saturday in the deadliest attack that Israel remembers on its territory. In the images coming from the Palestinian territory, you can see entire blocks reduced to rubble. At five in the afternoon, local time (four o’clock in mainland Spain), as it had warned, the armed wing of Hamas, the Ezedín al Qasam Brigades, launched a barrage of rockets on Ashkelon, a city in the south. of Israel with 170,000 inhabitants.
Israel claims to have regained control of all its territory, stopped new infiltrations and found 1,500 bodies of Hamas militiamen who crossed in a surprise operation on Saturday. In the Strip, some 200,000 of the 2.2 million inhabitants have already sought refuge, either due to having lost their homes, or due to the intensity of Israeli air and naval bombardments and the foreseeable ground incursion. Many of them are in schools run by UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. The Gaza Strip, where the death toll currently stands at 788, has been completely surrounded since Monday, as Israel cut off the supply of food, electricity and fuel.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) speaks of an increase in mass displacement in the last 24 hours and expects it to increase. Egypt closed this Tuesday “until further notice” the only border crossing with the Strip that Israel does not control, Rafah. It was barely functioning on Monday, after a recent bombing. Under normal conditions, only a few Palestinians manage to get out there (after long lines and often with bribes). On Monday, only those who previously had an exit permit were allowed.
Israeli army spokesman Richard Hecht this morning recommended that residents of the Strip who can “leave” through Rafah do so, because a “disruptive and severe” offensive is coming. “We are going to act very severely. “This is not the usual contained exchange of blows in which Qatar mediates,” he noted in a video conference with journalists. Later, the army clarified that Rafah is closed and that it was not “an official call to Gaza residents to leave for Egypt.”
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On Monday, the spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, Abu Obaida, announced that he would execute one of the at least 130 Israelis captured in the operation for each bombing that Israel launches without prior warning. He refers to the firing of small missiles – generally with very little explosive charge – shortly before the actual bombing, so that the inhabitants run away.
Two of those killed in an airstrike are Hamas officials, according to the Israeli military. Yoad Abu Shmala was the Minister of Economy of the Gaza Government (in the hands of Hamas since 2007) and Zakaria Abu Maamar was responsible for the internal relations department. Both belong to the political bureau, not the military branch. An official Hamas source has confirmed the deaths to the Reuters agency.
Three journalists dead
Three Palestinian journalists, Said al-Taweel, Mohammed Sobboh and Hisham Nawajhah, were also killed in a bombing that hit a residential building near the fishing port of the capital Gaza, the local journalists’ union reported.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has condemned this tightening of the siege that Israel began more than a decade ago, with the support of Egypt for some years. “The imposition of blockades that endanger the lives of civilians by depriving them of goods essential for their survival is prohibited by international humanitarian law,” he stressed in a statement.
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