“The number of martyrs [killed] is more than 30,000,” announced the Ministry of Health of the Gaza Strip, territory administered by Hamas, in a press release published Thursday, February 29 in the morning, reporting at least 79 new deaths in nighttime Israeli strikes.
The war has transformed the Palestinian territory into a “death zone,” according to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization. On a daily basis, civilians pay the heaviest price in the fighting and bombings which have spared no area, devastated entire neighborhoods and forced 1.7 million Palestinians, out of the 2.4 million inhabitants the enclave, to flee their homes.
On the Israeli side, the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, caused the death of at least 1,160 people, the majority civilians, according to a count by Agence France-Presse based on official data. After carrying out a bombing campaign by land, sea and air, the Israeli army launched, on October 27, 2023, a ground offensive in the north of the territory while advancing towards the south. Since then, it has lost 242 soldiers.
“Famine looms,” worries UNRWA
In the territory besieged since October 9 by Israel, 2.2 million people, the vast majority of the population, are threatened with famine, according to the United Nations (UN), particularly in the north of the country. enclave where destruction, fighting and looting make the delivery of aid almost impossible.
The UN also denounced obstacles imposed by Israel, which controls the entry of aid from Egypt. According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), humanitarian needs are “unlimited”. “Famine looms. Hospitals have turned into battlefields. A million children face daily trauma,” she said.
According to the Hamas health ministry, seven children died of “dehydration and malnutrition” at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, and seven others at Kamal Adwan hospital, also in the north of the Strip. from Gaza.
The international community is also concerned about an upcoming Israeli ground offensive on Rafah, where nearly 1.5 million Palestinians are massed, according to the UN, most of them displaced, trapped against Egypt’s closed border. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he wanted to defeat Hamas in its “last bastion”. He said a truce would only “delay” such an offensive, while ensuring that civilians would be evacuated from combat zones.
Target of daily Israeli bombardments, Rafah, which had a population of 270,000 before the war, is the main entry point for aid into Gaza, which arrives in very limited quantities. The United States Agency for International Development says it is discussing with Palestinian officials the opening of “many more crossing points.” “It’s a matter of life and death,” said its administrator, Samantha Power, on the social network X.
Negotiations for a truce during Ramadan
Faced with this devastating war, Qatar, the United States and Egypt are trying to reach a truce agreement covering a six-week break in fighting. On Monday, US President Joe Biden spoke of “an agreement by the Israelis that they would not engage in operations during Ramadan” in order to “get all the hostages out.” “I hope that, by next Monday, we will have a ceasefire,” he said, while emphasizing that it was “not done yet.”
Demanding an agreement from their government to release the hostages, some 150 Israelis launched a four-day march from Reim, in southern Israel, to Jerusalem.
On the diplomatic front, representatives of Palestinian factions, including the rival movements of Hamas and Fatah, are in Moscow this Thursday for talks with the head of Russian diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov. On Thursday, New Zealand, one of the last Western countries not to have done so, announced that it would now also designate “the entirety of Hamas”, that is to say including the branch political, as a “terrorist entity”.
