UPDATED 1:11 P.M.
GAZA (Reuters) -The Palestinian death toll from Israel’s bombardment of Gaza climbed to about 3,000 on Tuesday, health authorities said, and at least six people were killed in an Israeli air strike that hit a school run by the U.N.’s Palestinian refugee agency.
The violence raged as Washington announced that U.S. President Joe Biden would visit Israel on Wednesday to show support for its war on Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip.
Israel has vowed to annihilate the Islamist group after Hamas gunmen crossed the border and killed 1,300 people, mainly civilians, during a rampage through southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, the deadliest single day in Israel’s 75-year history.
Since then Israel has flattened parts of densely urbanised Gaza with air strikes, driven around half of its 2.3 million population from their homes, and imposed a total blockade on the enclave, halting food, fuel and medical supplies.
An Israeli air strike killed senior Hamas military commander Ayman Nofal, who was in charge of central Gaza, according to Hamas’ armed wing, the Izz el-Deen Al-Qassam Brigades.
The Palestinian health ministry said on Tuesday that around 3,000 people – many of them women and children – had now been killed and 12,500 wounded in Gaza since Oct. 7.
It added that 61 Palestinians have also been killed and 1,250 wounded in clashes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA said at least six people were killed in an Israeli air strike that hit a school it ran in Gaza’s Al-Maghazi refugee camp.
“This is outrageous and again it shows a flagrant disregard for the lives of civilians,” UNRWA said in a social media post. “No place is safe in Gaza anymore, not even U.N. facilities.”
Amid the death and destruction, the humanitarian crisis in the besieged enclave deepened as Israeli troops and tanks massed on the border for an expected ground invasion.
Scores of trucks carrying vital supplies for Gaza headed towards the Rafah crossing in Egypt on Tuesday, the only access point to the coastal enclave outside Israeli control, but there was no clear indication that they would be able to enter.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Biden’s planned visit at the end of hours of talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which he said the Israeli leader had agreed to develop a plan to get humanitarian aid to Gaza civilians. He gave no details.
Blinken said Biden will “hear from Israel what it needs to defend its people”.
He will also hear how Israel will carry out operations in a way that minimises civilian casualties and lets humanitarian aid into Gaza to help civilians “in a way that does not benefit Hamas”, Biden said.
Israel’s national security adviser predicted on Tuesday that the United States would get “involved” if the war escalated to the point where Iran and the heavily armed Lebanese group Hezbollah joined in on behalf of Hamas.
In a briefing, Tzachi Hanegbi noted expressions of support by Biden which included U.S. naval deployments in the Mediterranean and a warning to Hezbollah and Tehran to stay out of the fighting.
“He is making clear to our enemies that if they even imagine taking part in the offensive against the citizens of Israel, there will be American involvement here,” Hanegbi said.
“Israel will not be alone … A U.S. force is here and it is ready,” he added, without elaborating.
Washington is also trying to rally Arab states to help head off a wider regional war, after Iran pledged “pre-emptive action” from its allies.
After Israel, Biden is expected to travel to Jordan to meet King Abdullah and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
He will also see Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, which exerts limited self-rule in the West Bank but lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007. The PA on Tuesday accused Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
LIFTING RUBBLE WITH BARE HANDS
In Jabalia, in the northern half of Gaza that Israel has ordered evacuated, frantic residents used their bare hands to lift chunks of concrete and metal, crying out when they located bodies from under rubble in a smoking bombing crater. Others ran with stretchers carrying the wounded.
A man emerged from a ruined building holding the limp body of a small boy in his arms.
Residents fleeing the north have crammed into southern areas such as Khan Younis but have found no respite from bombing there.
Amin Hneideq awoke to an explosion in Khan Younis that sent the window crashing down, lacerating his daughter’s head. The bomb had missed his house but destroyed a home nearby, killing a family from the north that had sought shelter there.
“They brought them from the north just to strike them in the south,” said Hneideq, weeping.
UNRWA, said only around 14 percent of Gazans had access to water through a single pipe to Khan Younis that Israel allowed to open for three hours on Monday. Concerns about dehydration and disease were high as water and sanitation services had collapsed. “People will start dying without water,” UNRWA said.
Even if the Rafah crossing opens to allow aid in, most Gazans will not be let out. Egypt rejects any mass exodus, saying it would amount to an expulsion of Palestinians from their land.
‘VILE VIDEO’
Hamas released a video of a French-Israeli hostage, Maya Schem, one of 199 captives seized during the militants’ Oct. 7 raid and taken to Gaza.
France called the video “vile”. Schem’s mother told a press conference she was “begging the world to bring my baby back home”.
Fighting has also intensified across Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.
The Israeli military said on Tuesday it had killed four people who had tried to cross the border to plant explosives. Security sources in Lebanon said four people had been killed by Israeli shelling near the village of Alma Al-Shaab on the Lebanese side of the frontier.
Iran, which sponsors both Hamas and Hezbollah, has celebrated the Hamas attacks on Israel but denies being behind them. Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian told state TV: “We cannot be indifferent to the war crimes committed against the people of Gaza.”
Clashes have also worsened in the West Bank, which was already engulfed in its worst unrest for years before the Hamas attacks from Gaza.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi, Bassam Massoud and Nuha Sharaf in Gaza, Ari Rabinovitch, Dan Williams, Henriette Chacar, Dedi Hayun, Maayan Lubell, Emily Rose, James Mackenzie and John Davison in Jerusalem, Humeyra Pamuk in Tel Avivi, Parisa Hafezi in Dubai, Hatem Maher, Ahmed Tolba and Omar Abdel-Razek in Cairo, Trevor Hunnicutt, Nandita Bose, Rami Ayyub and Katharine Jackson in Washington, Michelle Nichols at the United NationsWriting by David Brunnstrom, Stephen Coates, Peter Graff and Angus Macswan; editing by Nick Macfie, Alexandra Hudson and Mark Heinrich)
————————–
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden leaves on Tuesday on a whirlwind trip to Israel and Jordan to get an update on Israel’s war aims in its looming battle with Hamas militants and stress the need to get humanitarian assistance to Gaza civilians.
Biden is expected to spend part of Wednesday in Tel Aviv for talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials as Israel prepares a ground offensive aimed at eliminating Hamas militants in Gaza who killed 1,300 people during a rampage through southern Israeli towns on Oct. 7.
Biden will then fly to Amman for talks about accelerating humanitarian assistance to Gaza.
In Amman, he will meet Jordan’s King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has long been opposed to Hamas and whose organization exercises limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Biden’s second trip to a war zone this year – he visited Ukraine in February – carries some risk. His goal will be to show American solidarity with Netanyahu while trying to avoid a broader regional war involving Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah and Syria.
The United States has stationed a carrier strike group in the eastern Mediterranean in a show of force for Israel and a second is on the way.
Biden also wants to avert a humanitarian calamity in Gaza where authorities say more than 2,800 people have already been killed in Israeli bombardment over the last week.
Hundreds of tons of aid from several countries have been waiting in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula for days pending a deal for its safe delivery to Gaza and the evacuation of some foreign passport holders through the Rafah crossing.
“He’ll make it clear that we want to continue working with all our partners in the region, including Israel, to get humanitarian assistance in and provide some kind of safe passage for civilians to get out,” said White House national security spokesperson John Kirby.
Biden and Netanyahu, thrown into a wartime partnership despite deep political differences on the way forward in the Middle East, have joined forces.
Biden has given Israel full-throated support while stressing the need to head off a massive humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Their face-to-face meeting, after holding several phone calls since the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, will allow Biden to privately discuss concerns and possible red lines in the coming Gaza invasion.
Biden will also get an update on the scores of hostages taken by Hamas.
The State Department has said 29 citizens of the United States were killed in the Hamas attacks in Israel, with 15 citizens and one lawful permanent resident unaccounted for.
Israel has vowed to annihilate the Hamas movement.
Biden will make clear that “Israel has the right and indeed the duty to defend its people from Hamas and other terrorists and to prevent future attacks,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters after hours of talks with Israel’s war cabinet in Tel Aviv.
He said Israel would brief Biden on its war aims and strategy and on how it will conduct operations “in a way that minimizes civilian casualties and enables humanitarian assistance to flow to civilians in Gaza in a way that does not benefit Hamas.”
The U.S. and Israel agreed to develop a plan that will enable humanitarian aid from donor nations and multilateral organizations to reach civilians in Gaza, Blinken said.
(Reporting By Steve Holland; additional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk in Tel Aviv; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
Comments