Find here our update on yesterday’s situation.
On the 158th day of the war between Israel and Hamas, which began after the terrorist attack carried out by the Islamist movement, new Israeli bombings targeted Rafah on Tuesday March 12. This town in the south of the Gaza Strip serves as a refuge for hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
Israeli army bombings also hit the neighboring town of Khan Yunis and the northern city of Gaza. According to the Hamas health ministry, the strikes left at least 72 dead in twenty-four hours. The Israeli offensive, whose stated ambition is to annihilate the Islamist movement, has so far left 31,184 dead, the health ministry of the Gaza Strip, administered by Hamas, said on Tuesday.
“We are not close to an agreement” on a truce between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the release of hostages, ministry spokesperson Majed Al-Ansari said Tuesday. of Foreign Affairs of Qatar, country mediator of the negotiations.
All parties “continue to work through negotiations to reach an agreement, hopefully during Ramadan,” which began this week and lasts for a month, Al-Ansari said. However, he added that he was not able to “propose a timetable” for a truce agreement, specifying that the conflict remained “very complicated on the ground”.
For the first time in more than five months of war, a boat loaded with food left Cyprus on Tuesday for the besieged Gaza Strip on the brink of famine. The ship, which belongs to the Spanish NGO Open Arms, is transporting around 200 tonnes of food (rice, flour, canned goods, etc.) which is to be distributed in Gaza by the organization of Spanish-American chef José Andrés, World Central Kitchen.
This NGO has already had teams in Gaza since the start of the war and was responsible for building a jetty to be able to unload the cargo once the boat arrived. The location of this pier has not been specified for security reasons.
Cypriot Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos told public radio that Cyprus was preparing a second, “much larger” ship to Gaza. “Then we will work to make it a more systematic process with larger volumes,” he also said on Tuesday. At the same time, an American military ship left the United States on Saturday with the equipment necessary to build a jetty to unload other aid cargoes, an operation which could take up to sixty days.
During a speech to the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday, the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borell, denounced on Tuesday the use of hunger “as a weapon of war” in Gaza. “This humanitarian crisis is not a natural disaster, it is not a flood or an earthquake, it is man-made,” he lamented. “When we look at options for delivering aid, by sea or by air, we have to remember that we have to do it because the usual land route is closed. Artificially closed,” he insisted from New York.
The Israeli military announced Tuesday that a soldier, among the hostages taken to the Gaza Strip during the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, was killed that day. On its website, the army specifies, without giving further details, that this 19-year-old soldier, Itay Hen, “fell” in combat on October 7 and was taken to Gaza “by a terrorist organization.”
“Itay’s body is still being held by Hamas” in the Gaza Strip, she added. The confirmation of his death brings to 32 the number of hostages who are believed to have died, according to Israeli authorities, out of a total of 130 still held in the Gaza Strip.
In a statement, US President Joe Biden said he was “devastated” to learn of the death of this soldier, whose father and brother he had met at the White House in December. “I reiterate my commitment to all the families of those still held hostage: we are with you. We will never stop working to bring your loved ones home. »
The Israeli army carried out new strikes on Tuesday in eastern Lebanon, killing two people according to a security source at Agence France-Presse, after Hezbollah announced having launched around a hundred rockets on Israeli military positions.
According to the Israeli army, these strikes targeted “two Hezbollah military command centers in the Baalbek region”, and were a “response to rocket fire towards northern Israel”. The Lebanese Islamist movement claimed to be acting in retaliation for an Israeli air strike which had already left one dead the day before near Baalbek, a Hezbollah stronghold in the east of the country, bordering Syria.