Find here our situation update published yesterday.
The Israeli army intensely bombed the Gaza Strip on Friday January 19, killing nearly eighty Palestinians according to Hamas, and its soldiers continue to wage fierce battles against the Islamist movement in the town of Khan Younes, which has become the epicenter. of the battle. In the early hours of Friday, witnesses reported heavy fire and airstrikes in Khan Younes, the main city in the south of the Gaza Strip, where according to Israel many members of the leadership of Hamas, classified as a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union.
Most of the fighting is now in the south, but the army says it still faces attacks from isolated Hamas groups in the north of the 362-square-kilometer territory, devastated by bombing, which has pushed about 80 % of the population to flee to the south.
The war was sparked by an unprecedented Hamas attack on October 7 in southern Israel that killed 1,140 people, mostly civilians, according to an Agence France-Presse tally, from official figures. According to the Hamas-administered Health Ministry, 24,762 people, the vast majority women, children and adolescents, were killed and 62,108 injured in Israeli operations.
Communications are gradually starting to return in certain areas of Gaza after a week of outage, announced the Palestinian operator Paltel. The operator announced, on X, “the gradual return of telecommunications in several sectors of the Gaza Strip” which had been without telephone or Internet for a week. This resumption was later confirmed by the Hamas telecommunications ministry.
Before this resumption, the network monitoring organization NetBlocks had claimed that this outage was “the longest” recorded since the start of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement.
These cuts “severely limit the visibility of what is happening on the ground,” noted NetBlocks. They prevent Gaza residents from having “access to vital information or from calling for first aid, and hinder other forms of humanitarian response,” deplores the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). .
Joe Biden spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday, the White House announced. This is their first conversation since December 23, and it comes at a time of friction between the United States and Israel.
The American president and the Israeli prime minister, whose personal relationship is notoriously difficult, discussed “the latest events in Gaza and Israel,” according to the American executive, which promises to publish a report of the exchange later.
Benjamin Netanyahu rejected, on Thursday, a recurring request from Joe Biden, namely the coexistence, in the future, of the State of Israel with a Palestinian State: “Israel must have control of security over the entire territory located west of the Jordan. This is a necessary condition, which is in contradiction with the idea of [Palestinian] sovereignty,” the prime minister said, specifying that he had said this directly to the Americans.
Pakistan and Iran announced that they had agreed to a “de-escalation” of tensions, after an exchange of deadly strikes this week between the two countries. The reciprocal bombings which took place in the region of Balochistan, which the two countries share and whose border is very porous, had further accentuated regional tensions.
Pakistani authorities convened a security council on Friday including the heads of the army and military intelligence, after responding Thursday morning – in turn targeting “terrorist hideouts” in Iran – to an Iranian attack Tuesday evening in missile and drone targeting a “terrorist” group in Pakistani territory.
These two attacks left a total of eleven dead, mainly women and children, according to the authorities.
At least three houses were “completely destroyed” by Israeli aircraft in the village of Kfar Kila, in southern Lebanon, announced the official Lebanese news agency (ANI) and the mayor of the border town. ANI reported four houses targeted “since this morning by Israeli aircraft in Kfar Kila”, three of which were “completely destroyed”.
“If Israel decides to expand its aggression, it will receive a real slap in response,” said Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s number two, in a statement. He further reiterated his remarks that a restoration of stability on the border and “in the region” was conditional on the “end of aggression in Gaza.”
The violence has left more than 195 dead in Lebanon, including at least 142 fighters from the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, which has a strong presence in the south of the country. On the Israeli side, 15 people died, 9 soldiers and 6 civilians, according to the Israeli army.
The United States “conducted three successful defensive strikes” against Houthi rebels in Yemen, White House spokesman John Kirby said. He said these operations targeted missile launchers ready to strike in the Red Sea.
Yemeni rebels, who say they are targeting “Israeli-linked” ships as a sign of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, earlier claimed new strikes against an American merchant ship traveling in the Gulf of Aden.
The European Union announced that it had taken individual sanctions against six people accused of financing Hamas. These people include Musa Dudin, a senior official in Hamas’s investment office, as well as several financial figures in Sudan, Algeria and Lebanon. “They will have their assets frozen in the European Union and will be banned from entering our territory,” announced a senior EU official on condition of anonymity.
The EU, which considers Hamas a terrorist organization, has strengthened its arsenal of sanctions against it since the October 7 attack. She added Yahya Sinouar, the leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement in Gaza, to her list of “terrorists” on Tuesday.
On Monday 22 January, EU foreign ministers will meet, separately, with their Israeli counterparts, Israel Katz, and Palestinian counterparts, Riyad Al-Maliki.