The first day of evacuations left Gaza on Thursday: How dangerous was it to go? A Palestinian refugee in the Rafah enclave
As people waited at the Rafah crossing on Thursday anticipating a second day of evacuations from Gaza into Egypt, the sound of an airstrike rattled the crowd, and a piece of shrapnel appeared to fall in the area.
“Reaching Rafah crossing was the most dangerous trip in my entire life,” Ala Al Husseini, 61, an Austrian citizen who evacuated on Wednesday, wrote in a text message from the bus that took him from Rafah to Cairo.
Reached by phone on Thursday after arriving in Cairo, he said that he had not been able to find any taxis or people who would drive him to the border because of a shortage of fuel in the Gaza Strip, and because phones were not working. Eventually he found a ride, but he and the driver were terrified while driving from central Gaza on the enclave’s empty streets.
Mr. Al Husseini said he feared that simply being next to a place that Israel considered a Hamas target could get him killed. “You could be collateral damage any time,” he said. I was afraid to death.
More than 330 foreign nationals and 21 wounded people traveled through the crossing on Thursday, Hisham Adwan said. Additionally, 45 aid trucks had crossed into the battered enclave, he said.
The numbers of transiting people were similar to those the day before, when 361 foreign nationals entered Egypt, and ambulances carried 45 severely injured Palestinians, along with some of their family members, to Egyptian hospitals, according to Al Qahera, an Egyptian state-owned television channel.
There were scores of people waiting at the crossing on Thursday, and Egyptian television showed people pushing luggage carts outside of the checkpoint.
Mr. Al Husseini said that the scene was chaotic. The people who were not in the group of hundred that was allowed to leave were among the crowds that were trying to leave.
People who could be evacuated were sometimes stopped from leaving because they didn’t have the needed documents, forcing them into difficult decisions.
After surviving more than three weeks of war in Gaza, a woman and her daughter went to the border crossing with Egypt. They said goodbye. She watched her son cross to safety without her.
The State Department of Israel is pushing for a full cease-fire to allow the Gaza Strip to be free of danger, according to Bethe Beseiso
The State Department has been in contact with around 400 Americans who have expressed a desire to leave, department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Wednesday. With their family members, the total number is around 1,000, Miller said.
He is hoping they will all eventually be able to get out. “The situation is beyond catastrophic and beyond even imagination,” he said. “The death, bombing, bloodshed.”
Lena Beseiso, 57, an American who had come to the crossing repeatedly only to find it closed, was finally traveling through it on Thursday with her family. But her feelings were bittersweet.
Some would-be evacuees tried to go to the crossing multiple times after hearing it could possibly open, but were turned away at the gate. Rumors and confusion abounded as news spread that the crossing was open this week, prompting many people to head there even though they were not yet scheduled to depart. A lack of internet and spotty phone connections might make some people not know that they were on the list to leave this week.
But reaching safety was hardly as simple as showing up at the border, foreign passport in hand, as several evacuees described in interviews with The New York Times.
The official said that officials in Egypt, the US and Israel were against allowing the Hamas fighters to leave Gaza. The official said that the delays continued because Hamas kept offering lists that included their members.
Ms. Salah spoke in a phone call from the city of Khan Youns, which is in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. To be free from danger.
The U.S. has called for a temporary “humanitarian pause” to enable more aid to enter Gaza and for hostages to be released, though Blinken and other U.S. officials have fallen short of a demand for a full cease-fire.
On October 20, that happened, officials said. The area where the Red Crescent picked up the two American women was to be free of shelling. That pause ended shortly after the women were released.
TEL AVIV, Israel — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel for another visit to urge the country to prioritize the protection of civilians in Gaza, as Israel continues its offensive in the Palestinian territory and tensions rise in the region.
Humanitarian groups are calling on Mr. Biden to respond to the crisis in Gaza, where food, medicine and fuel are in short supply. A strike on a refugee camp in Gaza this week killed dozens of people even as Israeli officials said they killed a top Hamas leader.
At a fund-raiser in Minneapolis on Wednesday evening, a protester confronted Mr. Biden and demanded that he call for a cease-fire. Mr. Biden responded: “I think we need a pause. Give time to get the prisoners out.
A humanitarian pause would also allow more of the millions of civilians who remain in Gaza an opportunity to move to relative safety until the hostilities end. Hundreds of foreigners, including many Americans, were allowed to leave Gaza and enter Egypt when the border crossing was opened earlier this week.
Officials have said negotiations are continuing for the release of additional hostages, with representatives of Qatar serving as mediators. If those negotiations succeed, officials said they would urge Israel to agree to stop its operations in the area where Hamas is set to release the hostages.
Hezbollah’s Plan for the End of the Second Phase of the Israeli-Israel War and its Implications to Hamas
The concern, the officials said, is that the trucks need a way to safely get the aid to neighborhoods without risking being hit by an Israeli airstrike or caught in the middle of fighting on the ground. And the official said the aid does no good if residents of a neighborhood are too afraid to come out of their homes to get the food or water.
At least 17 Israeli soldiers have died since Israel’s ground troops entered Gaza in what officials have called the “second phase” of the war. In all, 332 Israeli soldiers have been slain in the conflict, most of them on October 7.
Both sides in the conflict have to obey this measure to be effective. It would require the agreement of Hamas’s interlocutors to stop launching rockets at Israel. All of the hostages held by Hamas should be released, because it includes many women and children.
How Israel ends its campaign to defeat Hamas matters, we’ve been clear about that. It matters because it’s the right thing to do. It matters because failure to do so plays into the hands of Hamas and other terror groups,” Blinken said.
That is not Hezbollah’s plan, the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a widely anticipated address to his followers on Friday, his first public remarks since the start of the war.
He said that Hezbollah was already exchanging fire with the military of Israel to keep it tied up along the northern border with Lebanon.
“The Lebanese front has lessened a large part of the forces that were going to escalate the attack on Gaza,” Mr. Nasrallah said. It is true that some people in Lebanon say that we are taking a risk. But this risk is part of a beneficial, correct calculation.”
That message was most likely a disappointment to Hamas, a Hezbollah ally that is also supported by Iran, some of whose leaders have called on their regional partners to do more in the fight against Israel. Israel, the United States and other countries consider both groups terrorist organizations.
Mr. Nasrallah did not rule out anything, however, warning that he was keeping Hezbollah’s forces ready should hostilities with Israel escalate. All the possibilities are open on our side of the border. All the choices are available and we can use them at any time.
During one of the most tense periods in the Middle East in recent years, though, Mr. Nasrallah’s speech offered a small measure of relief for many, that at least one powerful force was not seeking to plunge the region into even greater violence.
Mr. Nasrallah is a highly respected figure inside a group that calls itself the “axis of resistance,” a network of Iranian-backed militias in several Arab countries that share an anti-American and anti-Israeli ideology and have come to coordinate their operations more closely in recent years. If Hezbollah launches a full-on war with Israel, it would most likely encourage attacks by allied militias in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Mr. Nasr Hezbollah lashed out at the US for its support to Israel, accusing President Biden of lying in telling it that it did not have the right to defend itself.
He said the group was not intimidated by US aircraft carriers in the eastern Mediterranean, which could hit Hezbollah targets.
You fleets in the Mediterranean do not frighten us and will never scare us. We’re prepared for the fleets you threaten us with as well.
Hezbollah could face attacks from its allies in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere if the United States intervenes directly in the war.
The United States sent the carriers in order to deter a wider regional war, as mounting anger in Arab countries over the situation in Gaza led to the sending of more carriers, according to the military. Israel has faced increasing international criticism over the dire conditions in Gaza, but has so far resisted calls for either a cease-fire or humanitarian “pauses” to help deliver aid.
The leader of the Hezbollah group praised his fighters for launching daily attacks against Israel and destroying communications infrastructure. Those attacks had forced Israeli civilians to flee and drawn Israeli military resources to the north so that they could not contribute to attacks on Gaza.
Thousands of Hezbollah supporters gathered to watch the speech on giant screens in locations throughout Lebanon. The largest site, in Beirut’s southern suburbs, was decorated with Hezbollah and Palestinian flags. Supporters chanted “We are here for Nasrallah” as gunshots rang out when he appeared.
He said the future of this front with Israel hinges in large part on the development of events in Gaza. He called foreign nations, and on the U.S. in particular, to pressure Israel to end the war in Gaza. He said that if the region wanted to avoid a war, it had to end the aggression on Gaza.
In Beirut, Mohamad Sbeti, 40, fired a volley of celebratory gunshots into the air with a pistol after Mr. Nasrallah finished speaking. He said he would answer any call by Hezbollah to fight Israel.
Mr. Sbeti was not concerned about how Israel would damage Lebanon in a new war.
U.S. Solidarity With Israel In Gaza After the Hezbollah September 7 Attack: a Leader in the Security of the Middle East
“We stand strongly for the proposition that Israel has not only the right but the obligation to defend itself and to do everything possible to make sure that this Oct. 7 can never happen again,” Blinken said Friday.
Speaking alongside Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Friday in Tel Aviv and again in a subsequent news conference, Blinken reiterated U.S. solidarity with Israel.
“We provided Israel advice that only the best of friends can offer on how to minimize civilian deaths while still achieving its objectives of finding and finishing Hamas terrorists and their infrastructure of violence,” Blinken said.
Blinken was set to make other visits elsewhere in the Middle East as the leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened an escalation of skirmishes with Israel along the border between the two countries.
Over 9,500 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war. The Ministry of Health in Gaza said two-thirds of the victims are children and women.
A major focus of discussions Friday emphasized the U.S. wish for a “humanitarian pause,” which Blinken said would allow much more desperately needed aid to enter Gaza and for the more than 200 hostages to be released.
Despite international criticism, Israel followed international law in response to the attacks, as claimed by the country’s leader.
Herzog said Gaza citizens are receiving millions of leaflets, text messages and phone calls to alert them in advance of airstrikes and to warn them to leave the area he claimed in accordance with international law.
The families of hostages had gathered outside and were demanding their loved ones be returned, which included many Israelis and Americans.
On Friday, a senior administration official provided more detail about those demands, speaking with reporters on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations. According to the official, Hamas provided lists of Palestinians who had been wounded to Israel and the United States and should be allowed to leave. The official said that the vetting showed that a lot of them were Hamas fighters.
Biden administration officials have said that the negotiations with Hamas for the release of Americans and other foreign nationals was indirect, and undertaken with the help of representatives of the government of Qatar, which has long maintained lines of communications with Hamas.
The official who spoke to reporters on Friday said that Hamas eventually relented in its demands for the passage of its fighters. The prospect of Hamas fighters leaving Gaza was especially troubling for Egypt, which remains concerned about the possibility of terrorists flowing into its country.