Despite increasingly pressing calls for a ceasefire, the Hamas health ministry reports Israeli strikes which hit the north and center of the Gaza Strip on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, April 10. , including the Nousseirat camp, where 14 people – including children – were killed. In twenty-four hours, 122 additional deaths were recorded, according to a ministry press release.
The Israeli army, without reference to this strike, declared for its part that it had targeted several targets, including a rocket launching base, and had killed members of a “terrorist cell”.
Since the start of the war, Israeli military operations launched in the Gaza Strip have left 33,482 dead, the majority of them women and minors, according to the Hamas health ministry. On the Israeli side, more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, died, according to a report established by AFP based on official Israeli figures.
Neither respite nor parenthesis, in the fighting which has lasted for more than six months, on this first day of Eid-el-Fitr, which marks the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. On Wednesday, from Jerusalem – where thousands of faithful braved the cold and rain – to Gaza – where many Palestinians gathered to pray in the middle of the ruins – this holiday is unlike any other this year.
In an interview broadcast on Tuesday – but which was however recorded before the withdrawal, on Sunday, of Israeli soldiers from the large town of Khan Younes, in the south of the Gaza Strip, and the increase, in recent days, of the humanitarian aid authorized by Israel to enter the territory – the American president, Israel’s most powerful ally, described the conduct of the war in Gaza by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “mistake”.
“I don’t agree with his approach,” Joe Biden said again during this interview on the Spanish-language channel Univision, in response to a question about the conduct of the war. “What I’m asking is that the Israelis call for a ceasefire, that they allow for the next six or eight weeks full access to food and medicine coming into the country,” continued Ms. .Biden.
Hamas leader Ismaïl Haniyeh announced Wednesday on the Al-Jazeera channel the death of three of his sons and several of his grandchildren in an Israeli strike in the Gaza Strip. “I thank God for the honor brought to us by the martyrdom of my three sons and some of my grandchildren,” Mr. Haniyeh told the Qatari channel from Doha. In a statement, the Palestinian Islamist movement confirmed the death of three of its leader’s sons and four of his grandchildren.
Ismail Haniyeh is the head of Hamas’s political office, based in Qatar, from where he can move freely and from where he supervises the Palestinian group’s negotiations. His family home in the Gaza Strip was destroyed in November by the Israeli army.
Reacting to his sons’ deaths, he said it would not change ongoing talks on a truce deal in Gaza. “The enemy is mistaken if he believes that by targeting my sons, at the height of the negotiations and before the movement sends its response, he will push Hamas to change its position,” he said on Al- Jazira. “The blood of my sons is not dearer than the blood of our people. »
The mediating countries – Qatar, Egypt, United States – are awaiting responses to a new three-step proposal, submitted on Sunday to both camps in an attempt to end the war. Hamas said it was “studying the proposal” before transmitting its response to mediators. And Israel, for its part, maintains its plan for a land offensive on the town of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, which it presents as the last great bastion of Hamas, despite the presence of a million and a half people, according to the UN, the majority of displaced people came to seek refuge there.
Before Spanish deputies, Pedro Sanchez declared on Wednesday that “the international community will not be able to help the Palestinian state if it does not recognize its existence.” “It is in the geopolitical interest of Europe,” added Mr. Sanchez, reaffirming that Madrid was “ready” to do so but without giving a precise date.
The most critical voice within the EU vis-à-vis Israel, Mr. Sanchez, who governs in coalition with the far left, once again issued strong criticism of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The Israeli government’s absolutely disproportionate response to the Hamas terrorist attack overturns decades of humanitarian law and threatens to destabilize the Middle East and consequently the entire world,” he said.
The desire of the Spanish Prime Minister – who has been talking about such recognition since November – is to act in a coordinated manner with other member states. At the end of March, on the sidelines of a European summit in Brussels, he published a joint declaration with his Irish, Maltese and Slovenian counterparts in which the leaders said they were “ready to recognize Palestine”, when this could “make a positive contribution » to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israel is facing very strong international pressure to allow more humanitarian aid to pass into the territory of the Gaza Strip, which is threatened with famine. On March 18, five NGOs submitted a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court in the hope that the authorities would “respect their obligations as an occupying power” by providing all necessary aid to the population.
The court gave the government until Wednesday to answer a series of questions about its policy on humanitarian aid to Gaza. Ahead of the deadline, authorities said 468 trucks entered the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, the highest number in one day since the start of the war.
“We are seeing a radical change that we hope will continue and expand,” the head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Samantha Power said on Tuesday, calling on Israel to let in more 500 trucks per day.