AFP Videos – France
In devastated Rafah, Israeli army wants to use “all means” to bring back hostages
The Israeli army wants to use “all means” to bring back to Israel the hundreds of hostages, alive or dead, still captive in the Gaza Strip, its spokesman told a group of foreign journalists in the city of Rafah, devastated by the fighting, on Friday. The hostages “are all in [la bande de] Gaza, held by the [mouvement islamiste palestinien] Hamas in cruel conditions, like in this tunnel,” Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said at the entrance to a conduit leading to the underground where the army says it found six of the captives summarily executed by their captors about two weeks ago. “We must do everything, everything possible, and [utiliser] “We will do everything we can to bring them home,” he added during a brief visit organized for a group of foreign journalists – including an AFP videographer – who were embedded with the Israeli army inside the Gaza Strip. Because of restrictions imposed by Israel since the outbreak of war more than 11 months ago, international journalists cannot travel independently to the Palestinian territory devastated by bombing and fighting. The announcement in early September of the discovery of the six dead hostages sparked a wave of grief and anger in Israel, where critics have been mounting to accuse the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of not doing enough to reach a ceasefire agreement with Hamas that would allow the hostages to be freed. The war was triggered by a Hamas attack that left 1,205 people dead on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, including hostages killed or killed in captivity, according to a 2014 count. AFP from official Israeli data. The Israeli military campaign of reprisals on the Gaza Strip has left at least 41,118 dead, according to the Ministry of Health of the Hamas government for Gaza, which does not specify the proportion of fighters and civilians killed. – “Labyrinth” – In the far south of the Gaza Strip, adjoining the border with Egypt, the city of Rafah, where Israeli army troops have been engaged on the ground since the beginning of May, appears devastated, according to the images of the AFPTV journalist, subject to Israeli military censorship before their broadcast. Apart from the soldiers, the streets are deserted, and offer as landscape only a succession of facades of buildings or houses gutted or completely destroyed. The dull hum of Israeli drones is incessant. In the distance, we can hear at times a few bursts of automatic weapons. “There is a labyrinth of tunnels here […] under the houses. Hence the destruction,” Admiral Hagari said. “To destroy [le Hamas et retrouver les otages] we must take control of this underground system,” he added, to justify the duration of the fighting. The army also showed the journalists on board on Friday the “Philadelphia corridor”, a buffer zone running inside the Gaza Strip along the border with Egypt. The question of whether or not the Israeli army should control it is one of the sticking points in the indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas through mediation led by Egypt, the United States and Qatar. Hamas demands that Israeli forces eventually evacuate the entire territory of the Gaza Strip. Mr. Netanyahu, for his part, repeats over and over that Israel must keep control of this corridor, recently paved by the Israeli army, as AFP was able to see on Friday. sha/mj/lpt
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