The Israeli army bombarded the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, where fighting took place between soldiers and Hamas in Rafah. This after a new warning from the United States to Israel about the risk of a regional conflict in the event of war against Lebanese Hezbollah.
In the north of the Palestinian territory, devastated by nearly nine months of war, Civil Defense said three children and a woman were killed early Wednesday in an Israeli strike on a home in Beit Lahia. Tank fire was reported in Gaza City.
According to witnesses, fighting took place between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian Hamas in the west of Rafah, in the south of the territory, where the Israeli army launched a ground offensive on May 7.
Mohammad al-Moughayyir, an official with the Hamas-run Gaza Civil Defense, told AFP that rescuers had recovered the bodies of “15 martyrs from various areas of the city of Rafah in the past few hours.”
But the agency’s spokesman, Mahmoud Bassal, said Israeli bombing was less intense on Wednesday. “Only a few areas have been targeted and the rest of the areas of the territory are calm” for the moment, he said.
“All possible scenarios”
The war in the Gaza Strip has led to violence on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where exchanges of fire are almost daily between Hezbollah, an ally of the Palestinian Islamist movement, and the Israeli army.
Even if the exchanges of fire have decreased in intensity in recent days, an escalation last week in attacks on both sides of the border and threats exchanged between Israel and Hezbollah have raised fears of a new war.
“A war between Israel and Hezbollah could easily become a regional war, with disastrous consequences for the Middle East,” warned American Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, receiving his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, in Washington on Tuesday .
“We are working closely to reach an agreement, but we must also prepare for all possible scenarios,” Gallant said.
On June 19, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, an Islamist movement that exercises major influence in Lebanon, warned that “no place” in Israel would be spared by his movement’s missiles, the day after an announcement of the Israeli army according to which “operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon” had been “validated”.
Four days later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the “intense” phase of fighting was coming to an end in the Gaza Strip, saying that afterward, Israel could “redeploy some forces to the north,” to the border with Lebanon, “for defensive purposes”.
“It seems that Israel, which devastated Gaza, is now setting its sights on Lebanon. We see that Western powers support Israel behind the scenes,” accused Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday.
Speaking of an “unpredictable situation”, Canada called on its nationals to leave Lebanon as quickly as possible.
“Uproot Hamas”
By announcing that the “intense” phase of the fighting, particularly in Rafah, was “about to end”, Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed that the war would continue in order to destroy Hamas, in power in Gaza since 2007 and considered a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel.
The objective,” according to Mr. Netanyahu, is “to recover the hostages” held in Gaza and to “uproot the Hamas regime.”
Humanitarian disaster
The war has plunged the Gaza Strip, besieged by Israel, into a humanitarian catastrophe and there is a “high and sustained risk” of famine in the territory of 2.4 million inhabitants, according to a report published Tuesday by the Integrated Framework food safety classification (IPC), on which UN agencies base themselves.
According to this report, 495,000 people still suffer from “catastrophic” hunger.
According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), “every day, 10 children lose one or two legs on average” in Gaza. “Ten a day means around 2,000 children after more than 260 days of this brutal war,” the agency said.
Humanitarian workers are not spared from war. Doctors Without Borders said on X that one of its members, Fadi al-Wadiya, had been “killed along with five other people, including three children, in an attack in Gaza City while he was cycling his work”.
The army confirmed that it had eliminated Fadi al-Wadiya, presenting him as an “important agent” of Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian group that fights alongside Hamas.
This article was automatically published. Sources: ats / afp
