Until “complete victory”. The Israeli government and army promised, Saturday, January 6, to continue the war against Hamas, which will enter its fourth month on Sunday, until the complete dismantling of the Islamist movement, in a Gaza strip that has become a “place of death ”, according to the United Nations.
During the day, the Israeli Air Force carried out new deadly bombings in the north and south of the enclave, where Hamas took power in 2007, while tension rose on the Israeli-Israeli border. Lebanese.
Lebanese pro-Iranian Hezbollah fired several dozen rockets towards a military base in Meron, in northern Israel, an attack presented as its first response to the elimination, attributed to Israel, of Hamas’ number two , Saleh Al-Arouri, Tuesday, near Beirut. The Israeli army says it struck in return “a series of terrorist targets” of the Lebanese Shiite movement in southern Lebanon.
Israel vowed to destroy Hamas after its unprecedented October 7 attack on Israeli soil which left 1,140 dead, mainly civilians, according to a count by Agence France-Presse (AFP) based on the Israeli toll. Around 250 people were kidnapped and around 100 were released during a truce observed at the end of November.
Families of Israeli hostages also gathered in Tel Aviv in the evening, under the slogan “We cannot reach 100 days, bring back the hostages now! “.
“Another way to eradicate Hamas”
“The war must not stop until we have achieved” all of its objectives, which are “to eliminate Hamas, recover the hostages and ensure that Gaza is no longer a threat to Israel,” he said. declared the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in a press release released at the end of three months of conflict.
The Israeli army shortly afterwards announced that it had “completed the dismantling of the Hamas military structure in the north of the Gaza Strip” and was now focusing on “the center and the south”.
Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip have left 22,722 dead, mostly women, children and adolescents, and more than 58,000 injured, according to the latest report from the Hamas health ministry.
According to AFP journalists, the army also bombed Rafah during the night and morning, at the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have flocked fleeing military operations further north.
The Israeli offensive has displaced 1.9 million people, or 85% of the population, according to the UN, who lack water, food, medicine and care, while hospitals are mostly out of service. The Gaza Strip has “simply become uninhabitable”, it is “a place of death and despair”, lamented the UN humanitarian affairs coordinator, Martin Griffiths. According to Unicef, fighting, malnutrition and the health situation threaten “more than 1.1 million children” in this small, overpopulated and impoverished territory.
“Israel has proclaimed its goal of eradicating Hamas. There must be another way to eradicate Hamas which would not cause so many deaths,” argued Saturday the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, visiting Lebanon.
Preventing “escalation”
“One of the real concerns is the border between Israel and Lebanon and we want to do everything possible to ensure that there is no escalation,” also declared the head of American diplomacy, Antony Blinken .
In a video message to the secretary of state, Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh, who is based in Qatar, urged him to “focus on ending” the Israeli offensive and “ending the occupation of all Palestinian land.”
“The future of the Gaza Strip” will be “determined by the Palestinian people and not by Israel”, whose “all scenarios (…) will only lead to failure”, for his part declared Saturday Hussein Al- Sheikh, a senior Palestinian Authority official in the occupied West Bank, in response to the post-war options presented Thursday by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
This plan, which has yet to be considered by a divided government, proposes that the administration of Gaza be entrusted to “Palestinian entities” from which Hamas would be excluded.