The Israeli armed forces launched new aerial bombardments overnight in Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, an AFP journalist reported, while complex talks continue in Cairo to declare a second truce between Israel and Hamas in the small enclave.

At a time when 2.2 million Palestinians, the vast majority of the enclave’s population, are threatened with starvation, according to the UN, aid organizations have reported that their facilities have been bombed.

During the night, the Israeli Air Force launched approximately ten bombing raids on Rafah. No casualty reports have been released so far.

Rafah is the “last stronghold” of Hamas, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who says he is determined, despite international protests, to order an assault on the city to “defeat” the Palestinian Islamist movement and free the remaining hostages.

Almost 1.5 million Palestinians, according to the UN, or more than half the enclave’s population (2.4 million), have taken refuge in Rafah, on the closed border with Egypt.

“We are waiting for death, day by day,” said resident Wissam Laffy. “We thank God when the day ends and we are still alive. We’re just waiting for death.”

US President Joe Biden’s adviser on the Middle East, Brett McGurk, is expected in Israel today, after the stop he made in Egypt for new talks on the truce.

“We want a deal … as quickly as possible,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters.

In Cairo yesterday, Qatar-based Hamas chief Ismail Haniya was expected to hold talks with Egypt’s intelligence chief, Abbas Kamal, about the “first phase” of a plan drawn up in January, an AFP source told the Hamas from Gaza.
It calls for a six-week truce, an exchange of hostages with Palestinian prisoners in Israel and more humanitarian aid entering the enclave.

Hamas wants a ceasefire, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip, the lifting of the Israeli blockade and safe haven for the hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced by the war. Israel, for its part, declares that the war will continue until Hamas is eliminated and all the hostages are returned.

Sexual violence

According to Israeli sources, more than 130 Israeli hostages remain in the hands of Hamas in the Gaza Strip — although an army spokesman recently said that at least 31 of them are believed to be dead — out of the approximately 250 kidnapped on October 7.

That day, Hamas’ military arm launched an unprecedented attack on southern Israel, killing more than 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data.

According to a report by an Israeli organization released on Wednesday, there were many cases of systematic and premeditated sexual violence during the attack.

On Monday, UN human rights experts called for an independent investigation into violence, including sexual violence, against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Israel’s civil-military leadership vowed after the October 7 attack to “wipe out” Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip since 2007, which the US and EU label a “terrorist” organization. Israeli military operations in reprisals have claimed the lives of at least 29,313 people in the Gaza Strip, the vast majority of them women and children, according to Hamas’ health ministry.

Yesterday the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, approved by a large majority a text submitted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejecting any “unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state”. Mr Netanyahu has said that recognizing a Palestinian state would amount to a reward” for Hamas’s “unprecedented terrorism”.

A few days earlier, the Washington Post reported that the US and Arab states are preparing a comprehensive plan for lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace after the Israel/Hamas war ends, including a timetable for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Division in the G20

The division of the international community took place yesterday at the meeting of the G20 foreign ministers in Brazil.

The head of Brazilian diplomacy, Mauro Vieira, denounced the “unacceptable paralysis of the Security Council” on the Gaza Strip, where yesterday the US, Israel’s main ally, exercised its veto to prevent the adoption of a draft resolution that deserved to be declared an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.

For its part, the US criticized statements by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who on Sunday compared the war in the Gaza Strip to the Holocaust by the Nazis, sparking a diplomatic firestorm.

The humanitarian situation is causing alarm especially in the northern Gaza Strip, an area given over to “chaos and violence”, according to the World Food Program (WFP) which suspended aid distribution there yesterday Tuesday.

Aid for civilians in the Gaza Strip, the passage of which is subject to Israeli approval, mostly arrives through the Rafah. But deliveries in the northern part of the enclave are almost impossible, due to the destruction and fighting.

The Israeli authorities announced yesterday that 98 trucks with humanitarian aid entered the Gaza Strip, while a collective of international NGOs, AIDA, strongly criticized the slowness of the cargo inspection process and the fact that dozens of trucks have been blocked for days at the border.

Wounds

In the southern part of the enclave, in Khan Younis, the theater of the last weeks of ground fighting and shelling, an Israeli tank opened fire last Tuesday evening against a building where some of the workers of the non-governmental organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans frontières, MSF) live. together with their families, in the Al Magazi area, as a result of which two relatives of its employee were killed.
MSF condemned yesterday “in the strongest possible way” this attack.

The Israeli military expressed its “regret”, telling AFP that it opened fire “during operations in Khan Younis” against a building that had been “recognized” as having “terrorist activities” taking place, but after the hit received information ” who talked about the death of two civilians who were not involved” in them.

In the same city, the Palestinian Red Crescent referred to Israeli “attacks” on Al Amal Hospital, two floors of which were hit, according to it, by Israeli artillery.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the main humanitarian aid organization operating in the Gaza Strip, has meanwhile found itself faced with new belligerence.

The mother of Yonatan Samerano, a 21-year-old Israeli who was killed in the October 7 attack, yesterday accused a UNRWA official of taking her child’s body with him to the Gaza Strip.

“How could the UN pay (the salary of) someone who was dragging his emaciated body on the ground and then picking it up as if it were booty in Gaza?” Agelet Samerano said indignantly during a press conference in Tel Aviv.

Western countries that are among the main funders of the agency, including the US, Germany, Britain, Japan, decided to suspend funding to UNRWA after Israel alleged that 12 of its approximately 30,000 employees were involved in the Hamas attack.
Also, United Airlines announced that its flights to and from Israel will resume next month; it is the first major US airline to announce such a decision since the October 7 attack.