MIDDLE EAST 09.11.23 06:00
Vicky Kapetanopoulou
50,000 people were forcibly evicted from their homes yesterday alone, as in Gaza City the Israeli army cynically murders everything that moves ● The uprooted are driven to the southern Strip, where they are also bombarded!
Israel’s armed forces are tightening their grip on the bomb-ravaged Gaza City as the asymmetrically deadly war enters its 34th day today and ground battles with Hamas in densely populated urban areas are only set to get tougher and bloodier in the coming months. .
Obeying Israeli invaders’ evacuation orders for their lives, impoverished residents continued to leave the militarily cut-off northern Gaza Strip on foot by the thousands, many carrying children and the disabled through a “safe corridor” along the Salah al-Din avenue that runs the martyred Palestinian enclave. Their numbers are soaring, according to the UN: around 15,000 on Tuesday, compared to 5,000 on Monday and 2,000 on Sunday.
Seeing the “response” the army extended by one hour the exit time window to the “safe” – with many quotation marks as well – southern Lane, where residential areas were also hit yesterday, causing new civilian deaths. In a rare rebuke, Hamas accused the UN agency for Palestinian refugees of “collusion” with Israel and its plans to lead to “violent displacement” of the population of the northern Strip. About 50,000 people who fled in the last 24 hours to the southern part of the enclave, an Israeli military spokesman said last night, boasting that they did so because they “realized that Hamas has lost control” in the northern part. He also stated that there will be no truce, but “humanitarian windows” at specific times to continue movement to the southern Strip.
Some 1.5 million people have taken refuge there, hundreds of thousands more, however, are estimated to remain in the besieged Gaza City either out of refusal or inability to leave. But the shortages of vital supplies are becoming more and more dire, with the UN reporting yesterday that all ovens in the northern Strip have now stopped working, having run out of fuel, water and flour. Desperate residents, he added, entered the last three ovens that still had flour and took almost 38 tons. The only functioning mill in Gaza can no longer grind wheat due to lack of fuel.
Despite the obvious dangers to the approximately 240 Israeli and foreign hostages held by Hamas in its labyrinthine tunnels, an Israeli military spokesman announced the use of explosives to blow them up, with 130 destroyed so far. At least 33 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the ground invasion, although Islamic State sources say its fighters are putting up a fierce resistance, using tunnels to ambush the enemy who are suffering heavy casualties.
From the Palestinian side, the registered dead of the war had reached a heartbreaking 10,569, among them 4,324 children and 2,823 women. “Each year the highest number of children killed by any side in all the conflicts we witness is in the hundreds at the most,” said G.C. to Reuters. of the UN, Antonio Guterres.
“Within a few days in Gaza we have thousands of children being killed, which means that something is clearly wrong in the way military operations are conducted” by Israel.
