Barcelona”I have written my children’s names on their wrists and legs so that they can identify them if we are bombed. I did this after I survived the terrible attack on Monday morning. But then, when I saw pieces of human bodies in the yard of the house and scattered on the roof, I thought it would do no good.” It is the chilling testimony of a Palestinian doctor who works with Doctors Without Borders and who was able to send a voice message to her colleagues from Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip. “We will all die. We hope it will be very soon to stop the suffering we live every second,” he says.
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This Tuesday, the Israeli army bombed for the third consecutive day the Nasser hospital (in Khan Yunis, a neighboring city of Rafah), one of the few that remain operational in the Strip, in an attack in which two journalists were seriously injured. ‘Al-Jazeera. In a WhatsApp message, Dr. Khaled Alserr explained to Middle East Eye that “the army told everyone to evacuate the hospital in thirty minutes before bombing it and shot three civilians at the door.”
In this city that is on the border between the Strip and Egypt, 1.3 million Palestinians have been accumulating in four months. Following evacuation orders from the Israeli army, most have moved, in some cases as many as seven or eight times, from other areas of the Gaza Strip to Rafah, and are currently they pile up in a territory of a few square kilometers. But after Monday’s bombing, in which the Israeli army killed more than a hundred Palestinians and freed two hostages from Hamas, and after the Israeli prime minister ordered the evacuation of Rafah, some Palestinians they have moved again, but this time to the center and north of the Strip, as Yamen Um, a Palestinian journalist who has also made the return journey, told ARA in a WhatsApp message. “Faced with the threat of an imminent invasion, people do not know what to do: they return to the center of the Strip, but there is nowhere safe. Everyone is very afraid. It is a nightmare, because they do not know where to go. They went in Rafah because the army said it was a safe place and now they are telling them they have to leave here. But where can they run? It’s like going around in a macabre circle,” he recounts.
The Palestinian population is exhausted, has very little food and water, tries to protect itself from the cold and lives in plastic tents. “If the Israeli army starts the invasion of Rafah, the danger is not only for the people who are there, but for the 2.3 million Palestinians who are still in the Strip. Because Rafah is the point through which the little humanitarian aid arriving in Gaza,” the journalist points out. “Israel’s goal is to kill all the Palestinians it can and drive the rest out of Palestine. It has destroyed everything: the houses, the schools, the hospitals, the streets… They say they are fighting Hamas, but in reality what they do is kill any form of life. They want us out of our land, because when the war is over there will be nothing left. They think that this way the Palestinians will end up leaving, but that will not happen,” he claims.
During the last week the Israeli army has intensified the bombing of Rafah, with dozens of attacks on densely populated areas. Faced with the humanitarian disaster that an invasion of southern Gaza would entail, international pressure on Israel is growing. On Tuesday, the United States warned Netanyahu that a military operation in Rafah that is not well planned would be a “disaster”. The president himself, Joe Biden, has publicly urged him to “protect” civilians. On Monday, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said Israel should think twice before attacking Rafah, and European foreign policy chief Josep Borrell urged the United States and Britain to stop ‘send weapons to Israel if they really want the war to end.
Talks for a ceasefire
One step away from disaster, negotiations on a cease-fire resumed on Tuesday, which Netanyahu himself rejected out of hand last week, when he rejected the six-week truce proposed by Hamas in exchange for the entry of humanitarian aid and the release of hostages. At noon, the representatives of the United States, Egypt, Qatar and Israel met in Cairo to find a way out on the edge. David Barnea, head of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, has met with William Burns, director of US intelligence; with those responsible for the secret services of Egypt, and with the Qatari Prime Minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani.
For weeks they have been seeking to square the circle with the same elements of the equation: the release of the 130 Israeli hostages who are believed to be still in the Strip, but who are unknown whether they are alive or dead, and whom Hamas wants to exchange for prisoners Palestinians; the end of the bombings and the more or less total withdrawal of the army from the Strip, and the arrival of humanitarian aid. This last requirement, however, should not be a matter of negotiation, since the UN Court of Justice has ordered Israel to guarantee the arrival of aid. South Africa, which denounced Israel for genocide in December, has asked the court to rule on more interim measures to prevent the offensive on Rafah.
The Cairo negotiations have rekindled hopes of a truce, now that Netanyahu faces international pressure and that of the hostages’ families, who are demanding a deal to get their loved ones out of the Strip. But it is too early to know how the Israeli prime minister, whose political future is at stake on the continuity of the governing coalition with the far-right, will respond to the pressures.
2024-02-13 21:51:39
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