After more than two hundred days of hostilities, the war in the Gaza Strip there is not the slightest sign today that it will stop soon, as the Palestinian enclave continued to be bombed as the US Senate gave the green light to billions of dollars worth of military aid to Israel to support its campaign against Hamas.

In the early hours today, AFP sources in hospitals and in the security services of the Gaza Strip spoke of new Israeli aerial bombardments in the sectors of Nuseirat (center) and Rafah, the “last” according to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, a major stronghold of Hamas, on the closed border with Egypt.

In Washington, the US Senate also approved the granting of new US military aid to Israel, worth $13 billion, in particular to strengthen the Iron Dome anti-missile shield.

The bill approved by the upper house also calls for some $9 billion to be spent to cover “the urgent need for humanitarian assistance in Gaza” as well as other “vulnerable populations” internationally, particularly in war-torn Sudan for over a year. Aid to Israel had already been approved by the House of Representatives on Saturday, after months of deadlock.

The aid was approved as pro-Palestinian protests roil US universities and several capitals, including Washington, are expressing concern for civilians ahead of a planned full-scale Israeli army ground offensive in Rafah, where they are crammed into makeshift camps somewhere 1.5 million Palestinians.

“Revelation”

According to Egyptian officials cited yesterday by the Wall Street Journal, Israel is preparing to move civilians to nearby Khan Yunis mainly, where he intends to set up accommodation, food distribution centers and field hospitals.

The hasty evacuation of civilians is expected to take two to three weeks and be carried out in coordination with the US, Egypt and other Arab countries such as the United Arab Emirates, while the ground operation will last at least six weeks, according to the sources. Journal.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galand announced that “a series of measures (…) are being studied in the framework of the preparations for operations in Rafah, especially for the hasty evacuation of civilians.”

“We don’t see at the moment any plan to quickly remove civilians” from Rafa, Fabrizio Carboni, the director of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC), told AFP yesterday, in whose view it is not even mass removal of civilians “feasible” under current conditions.

For Jan Egeland, the secretary-general of the non-governmental organization Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), the Israeli attack on Rafah, “the largest IDP camp on Earth”, would lead to an “Apocalypse situation”.

“No Horizon”

“After 200 days, the enemy remains trapped in the sands of Gaza. Without a purpose, without a horizon, without the illusion of victory or the release of prisoners,” the spokesman for the military arm of Hamas, Abu Ubeida, said yesterday. “We will continue to strike and resist as long as the occupation’s onslaught continues on even one centimeter of our territory,” he added.

The war broke out on October 7, when Hamas’s military arm launched an unprecedented raid from the Gaza Strip into southern parts of the Israeli territory, killing 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to a French tally. Agency based on official Israeli data. Another 250-plus people were kidnapped, of whom 129 remain hostages in the Palestinian enclave — but at least 34 of them are believed to have been killed, according to Israeli sources.

In retaliation, Israel has vowed to wipe out Hamas, which it labels a “terrorist” organization like the US and the EU, and its military operations have so far killed at least 34,183 people in the Gaza Strip, the majority of them women and children, according to the Palestinian Islamic Movement’s Ministry of Health.

Before the Rafah operation the Israeli army operated in Gaza City (north) and then in Khan Yunis.

“Climate of impunity”

The UN yesterday called for an independent international investigation into the mass graves found in the two largest hospitals in these cities, Shifa in Gaza and Nasser in Khan Younis, underlining the need to end the “climate of impunity”.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said yesterday that he was “horrified” by the destruction at these two hospitals and the discovery of “mass graves” in and around them.

The civil protection of Gaza announced that since Saturday it has proceeded to exhume 340 bodies of people killed and buried by Israeli forces in mass graves inside Nasser Hospital.

The Israeli army yesterday denied that it had buried bodies at the hospital, saying that in its operations there it had “examined” bodies “that had been buried by Palestinians” to ascertain whether they were among the Israeli hostages.

In the ruins of the Sifa hospital, a doctor, Amzad Aliua, went yesterday to show an AFP correspondent the emergency room, where there are obvious signs of fire, with the furniture partly destroyed and partly emptied: “After 200 days of war, we stand amidst the ruins of this great hospital” where “we received thousands of wounded every day,” he said.

From land and sea

In addition to the increasingly heavy toll of victims and widespread destruction, the population of the Gaza Strip continues to face, according to the UN, the risk of famine.

The US wants to begin “very soon, in the very near future” construction of a temporary jetty to facilitate sea deliveries of humanitarian aid to the besieged Palestinian enclave, the Pentagon announced yesterday.

In recent days, Israel, which controls the entry of goods into the Gaza Strip, has increased the number of aid trucks it allows to enter.

Israel and the UN do not always agree on the number of aid trucks arriving in the enclave, but yesterday the head of the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, expressed satisfaction that Monday saw a record number of arrivals. of assisted vehicles in a day (310).

“If there’s a will, there’s a way,” he commented in the evening via X, shortly after calling for the UN Security Council to conduct an “independent investigation” into the “180 UNRWA workers who have been killed” in the war.

The Security Council is expected to discuss humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip later today.