The Israeli War on Gaza: Israel’s First and Second Prime Minister, the Defense Minister, and the Human Rights Defenders in the Gaza Strip
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told NPR that Israel is committed to doing three things in Gaza: destroying Hamas, freeing the Israeli hostages it’s holding and giving Gaza a different future.
The prime minister did not speak about who should govern the territory, which is currently devastated by six weeks of Israeli bombing.
Israel claims that Hamas militants are embedding with the civilian population and insists it has a right to carry out strikes in its effort to wipe out Hamas.
Even before this war, Gaza was dependent on aid to function. The blockade of the Gaza Strip was imposed by Israel after the Hamas attack.
It’s unclear who would replace Hamas in the seat of government. The leader of the Palestinian Authority, which runs the West Bank, has said he is not interested — and Israel doesn’t want that either.
Netanyahu compared the situation in Gaza to the Allies’ occupation of Germany and Japan after World War II, after their surrender, for administrative and rehabilitative purposes (such a move by Israel, however, would likely be unilateral).
This week, Israeli troops closed in on Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, which is the territory’s main hospital. The lack of medical supplies, fuel shortages, and ground fighting caused Al-Shifa to stop functioning.
Israel said Hamas had a command center underneath Al Shifa, an assertion that the U.S. has publicly supported and Hamas has denied. The bodies of two people were found in the area of the complex, as well as weapons and equipment, according to the Israeli military. But those statements have not been independently confirmed.
Netanyahu said troops found weapons, ammunition, bombs and a “major” command center in the hospital, which he said Israel has now taken over. He stated that as troops moved in they brought Arabic-speaking doctors and incubators with them.
Hospitals are protected during war, but the safeguards are not absolute. Human rights groups continue to call for a cease-fire, which Netanyahu has said cannot happen until all the hostages are released.
It was during this week that the Israeli military told residents in southern town of Khan Younes they had to leave their homes. The NPR asked the IDF for comment on the displacement of civilians.
Families have risked journeys through the rubble of destroyed buildings and corpses along the road Israel designated as a “humanitarian corridor” through the war. Each day the road is open people carry or drag wounded loved ones. They push wheelchairs with patients just out of surgery in hospitals that have now stopped working. Mothers pull along weary children who look around with blank, fearful stares.
In response to questions from NPR, the Israeli Defense Forces press desk said that it is protecting the security of the state of Israel.
The number of buildings destroyed in the middle and southern part of the Gaza Strip has increased over time, according to analysis of imagery from the European Space Agency. Since the beginning of the conflict, over 10,000 buildings are likely to have been damaged or destroyed by airstrikes in these areas, according to analysis by Corey Scher of New York’s CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University.
When the Israeli military ordered the family to leave their home, they fled from Gaza City to the south. In October, he and his relatives took what they had and went to live with a cousin in Khan Younis, in the south of the Gaza Strip.
Eleven days later, at night on Oct. 24, most of the family were sleeping when, Saqallah says, “Death came.” The walls of the apartment were caved in by the multiple rocket attack, while the apartment on the third floor was destroyed. He says his face was burned when rubble fell on him.
Saqallah says his son was dead. His sister and her husband, as well as their three children, were with him. And so was his younger brother, 18, and a cousin.
Saqallah’s wife, who was heavily pregnant, was badly wounded. “When I carried her out of the building, her arm was gone and her legs were just flesh,” he says. Doctors managed to save her and the baby girl that she has now delivered — named Mariam after Saqallah’s dead sister.
Airwars: Israel stepped up attacks to southern Gaza — and it’s not safe, says Sanjana Varghese
The group parsed every report of harm to civilians south of Wadi Gaza in the first week after Israel told civilians to go there. Airwars gathered 127 allegations of civilian harm over a 10-day period.
“You can see that the frequency and intensity of those allegations of the attacks south of Wadi Gaza really appeared to increase,” Sanjana Varghese, a journalist who also works as an investigator at Airwars, says of the group’s as-yet unpublished analysis.
Varghese says that the southern strikes were part of a pattern of increased Israeli bombardment. Many of the reported attacks Airwars analyzed in the south were around civilian infrastructure, including schools, hospitals and restaurants.
“Calling this area an evacuation zone might technically be true,” says Varghese. It isn’t safe. It’s not something that people can go to and know that they’ll be taken care of.
Every day, we get confirmation of more colleagues killed, says UNRWA’s director of communications, based in Amman. It’s shattering. It’s shattering.
UNRWA regularly shares the coordinates of its centers with the Israeli military, and civilians come to the shelters hoping they are safe. Even these have become targets. Over the last month, UNRWA says 64 of its facilities have been damaged, including several in direct strikes. It says 71 people have been killed in its shelters by the attacks.
This shows that there is no safe place to live in Gaza. “Not the north, nor the middle areas, or the south,” says Touma. “Civilians, including children, including women, including men, including UNRWA colleagues, have been killed across the board across the Gaza Strip.”
A conference on Gaza in Paris last week was told that thousands of children could not be ‘collateral damage‘.
The War in Gaza: UNRWA ‘is the home of Daniel Wood’ — An Update from Tel Aviv, Israel, and Geneva, Israel
“People are gathering wood from the rubble of buildings where possible to make fires to cook over. They are searching for water, even digging holes to try to reach it,” says Procter, of the Geneva Graduate Institute. The man was living in Gaza and talking to people there.
Some aid trucks are moving into Gaza again, but humanitarian groups say they’re not enough to meet the need. UNRWA says diseases are spreading.
The Palestinian telecommunications provider said this week its cell towers in the Gaza Strip had stopped operating for lack of fuel, further isolating residents from the outside world. On Friday, it announced a “partial restoration” of services, after receiving “a limited quantity of fuel” via UNRWA to restart its generators.
Ruth reported from Rome. Washington, D.C. has been named the home of Daniel Wood. Fatima Al-Kassab also contributed to the story. Alon Avital contributed reporting from Tel Aviv. The reporter is Anas Baba from Gaza.