Tuesday, Israel kept attacking targets in Gaza, even though the UN stated deep concern and named a coordinator for much-needed humanitarian aid.
The Israeli army said it hit military sites and tunnel shafts in Khan Yunis in the south and Jabalia in the north of Gaza. Heavy fighting was still going on the ground.
Events involving groups backed by Iran in the Red Sea, along the border with Lebanon, and in Iraq made things more tense in the area during the war.
On Tuesday afternoon, black smoke covered most of central Gaza. In the south, pictures showed that some victims were taken to the hospital in Khan Yunis on horse-drawn carts.
When Hamas gunmen struck Israel on October 7, they killed about 1,140 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on Israeli numbers. This was the bloodiest Gaza war ever.
It is said that 129 of the 250 prisoners they took are still in Gaza.
In response, Israel bombarded and besieged the area and then invaded from the ground up. A new death toll from Gaza’s health ministry on Tuesday said that the operation had killed at least 20,915 people, mostly women and children.
Only a small amount of aid is getting into Gaza, where 2.4 million people are desperately lacking in water, food, fuel, and medicine.
“Safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale” was what the UN Security Council asked for in a resolution last week, but it didn’t say that the fighting should stop right away.
It asked the UN to select a humanitarian coordinator to oversee and check the aid that comes from other countries to Gaza. The UN named Sigrid Kaag, who is leaving her job as Dutch finance minister, to the job on Tuesday. She will start on January 8.
After days of fighting, the motion finally passed with Washington’s vote against it. In practice, this means that Israel is in charge of overseeing the delivery of help.
The UN says that about 1.9 million Gazans have been forced to leave their homes, with many going south.
“Due to the ongoing offensive,” Gaza’s main telecoms company, Paltel, said that Internet and phone service were cut again across the Palestinian region.
A spokesperson for the UN Human Rights Office, Seif Magango, said in a statement, “We are deeply concerned about the continued bombardment of Middle Gaza by Israeli forces.” This is especially true since the military told people to move to central Gaza and Rafah.
Netanyahu said again in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that peace can only happen if three things happen: “Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized.”
Herzi Halevi, the head of Israel’s army, told a news conference on Tuesday that the war “will continue for many more months.” This is similar to what Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said earlier in December, when he said “it will last more than several months.”
He said that the army is focusing its efforts in the south of Gaza.
Watching a child die
According to the military, three more Israeli soldiers were killed in fighting in Gaza on Tuesday. This brings the total number of deaths to 161 since the ground attack began on October 27.
Abu Lahia, in the far north of Gaza, was shown by AFPTV as having a lot of dirt and rubble piled up in front of the Indonesian hospital. It looked like someone had folded up an ambulance so much that it was hard to tell what it was.
After strikes that killed at least 70 people, some people who lived in the central Gazan Al-Maghazi refugee camp went back to their destroyed homes. AFP was not able to independently confirm that number.
Sean Casey is the supervisor for the World Health Organization’s Emergency Medical Teams. After the strikes on the refugee camps, he went with a WHO team to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah city.
Casey seemed to be holding back tears in a video taken inside the hospital as he talked about Ahmed, a nine-year-old boy who was hit in the head and is “basically being treated with sedation to ease his suffering as he dies.”
The WHO’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, spoke again about his “call for an immediate ceasefire” and said that only a few of Gaza’s clinics are even partially operational.
He said that efforts to help simply “are not coming close” to meeting the needs of the people in Gaza.
The Israeli army said it was “looking into what happened” in Al-Maghazi and that it is “committed to international law, which includes doing what it can to protect civilians as much as possible.”
Israel’s friends are putting more and more pressure on it to protect civilians.
US-Israeli consultations
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Netanyahu told members of his conservative Likud party on Monday that he was ready to back the free movement of people out of the Gaza Strip.
Any such talk was called “absurd” by Hamas in a statement, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that forcing Palestinians into Egypt “is a nonstarter.”
A spokesperson for the National Security Council, Adrienne Watson, said that Blinken met with Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, Ron Dermer, and the US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, on Tuesday to talk about “matters related to the conflict in Gaza and the return of hostages held by Hamas.”
Sources in Gaza’s health ministry said that Israel returned the bodies of 80 Palestinians killed in Gaza after taking them from morgues and graves to make sure there were no prisoners among them.
The army didn’t say anything right away.
Iran backs the Huthi rebels in Yemen, who said they fired missiles at a ship in the Red Sea and sent drones at Israel as a show of support for Gaza.
It was later reported that an Israeli fighter jet had shot down “in the Red Sea area a hostile aerial target that was on its way to Israeli territory.”
During the Israel-Hamas war, the US military attacked pro-Iran groups in Iraq. These groups were blamed for many attacks on US and allied troops.
Police in Iraq say that at least one person died in the attack.
Israel’s military said that an anti-tank missile fired by Hezbollah, a movement in Lebanon backed by Iran, hurt nine troops. Hezbollah also said that two of its fighters had died.
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