The 7-hour humanitarian pause yesterday allowed around 50,000 Palestinian civilians, according to the Israeli military authorities, to evacuate towards the south of the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, the Israeli army continued its operations in the north of the enclave and announced that it had killed Ahmed Siam, the Hamas commander who was “holding around 1,000 Gazans hostage at the Rantisi hospital”, one of the hospitals captured aim in the last few days, preventing them from evacuating to the south. Siam was hiding in al-Buraq school in Gaza City along with other militiamen under his command. The exchanges of rockets between Israel and Hezbollah bases do not stop either. After the speech by the leader of the Lebanese group Hassan Nasrallah, who spoke to the nation stating that the resistance in Lebanon has intensified, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant accused him of “dragging Lebanon into a war” and warned that : «What we are doing in Gaza, we know how to do in Beirut».
“We started losing lives.” It is the latest tragic update that comes from the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City which remains in darkness, without electricity due to lack of fuel. The medical devices are turned off and the intensive care unit is out of order. The Israeli NGO Physicians for Human Rights Israel reports that at least 2 premature babies have died in incubators and another 37 are in danger of dying. After appeals from large NGOs such as Unicef, the Israeli army has announced that it will help coordinate the evacuation of the newborns. However, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) also denounced attacks against the maternity ward and spoke of “patients and doctors trapped in al-Shifa”. “They shoot anyone outside or inside the hospital and prevent movement between the buildings of the complex,” said hospital director Mohammed Abu Salmiya, referring to the Israeli troops who have now surrounded the entire building. MSF staff also reported witnessing “shots being fired at people as they attempted to escape from the hospital”. A circumstance denied by the Israeli army which, through the head of the Coordination and Liaison of the Israeli army in Gaza, Moshe Tetro, assured: «There are clashes between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the Hamas terrorists operating around the hospital but there are no shootings at the hospital and there is no siege. The east side of the hospital remains open. Anyone who wants to leave can. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar.”
The Palestinian photojournalist Hassan Eslaiah, a collaborator during the October 7 attack for some international newspapers, including Associated Press and CNN, also had to defend himself from the accusations launched by Israel. The Israeli NGO HonestReporting had raised doubts about its possible closeness to Hamas. “I am a freelance photojournalist and I have nothing to do with them,” Eslaiah said, calling the accusations against him “misleading and inflammatory.”
To know more
– The agony of the hospital in Gaza
– Riyadh, Raisi’s show at the Islamic summit: “I kiss the hands of Hamas, it resists Israel”
– Jonathan Littell: “We have abandoned Gaza for years. Now the protests are influencing governments”
– The anti-Semitic wave, cases tripled after October 7: “We feel like targets”
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