Monitoring Desk
GAZA: The health ministry in Gaza says the total number of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks since October 7 is now 17,177, with more than 46,000 others wounded. In the past 24 hours, 350 Palestinians have been killed, the ministry added.
Israeli PM Bejamin Netanyahu threatened Lebanon’s Hezbollah in a video message posted on microblogging site X. “If Hezbollah makes a mistake, it will turn Beirut and South Lebanon into Gaza and Khan Yunis,” the post read. The threat came after the Israeli army said that anti-tank fire from Lebanon hit an Israeli civilian.
The army said it “attacked the sources of the fire using helicopter gunships, tanks and artillery fire”.
A short while ago, Hezbollah claimed a strike on the area of al-Jardah in Israel. It is unclear if this is the strike Israel blames for the civilian casualty, Al Jazeera reported. UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health Tlaleng Mofokeng said that the “practice of medicine is under attack” in Gaza. “As a practising medical doctor, I cannot fathom what my Gazan colleagues are enduring. They are working while their colleagues and loved ones are under attack. Many have been killed while treating their patients,” Mofokeng said in a statement.
The UN expert also reiterated her calls for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the occupation of Palestinian territory. “We bear witness to a shameful war on healthcare workers. This war is raging because of a lack of political leadership. End the war on Gaza, and end it now”. Egypt is striving to accelerate the delivery of aid to the Gaza Strip, a senior official said on Thursday, after the amount of relief getting through to the Palestinian enclave dipped with the end of the Israel-Hamas truce on December 1.
Diaa Rashwan, head of the State Information Service, said Egypt would never allow the emptying of the Gaza Strip of its residents as Israel’s military campaign pushes them southwards towards the border with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Rashwan added that Egypt believed Israel’s operations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank aimed to force Palestinians towards Jordan. Amnesty International said on Thursday that Israeli strikes that killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and injured six others in south Lebanon on October 13 were likely a direct attack on civilians that must be investigated as a war crime.
Human Rights Watch, in a separate statement, said the two Israeli strikes were “an apparently deliberate attack on civilians and thus a war crime”. A Reuters investigation published on Thursday found an Israeli tank crew killed Abdallah and wounded the six other reporters by firing two shells in quick succession from Israel while the journalists were filming cross-border shelling from a distance. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has published a report highlighting food insecurity in the Gaza Strip, pointing out that households in northern Gaza are “experiencing alarming levels of hunger”.
At least 97% of households in northern Gaza have “inadequate food consumption”, with nine out of 10 people going one full day and night without food. In the southern governorates, a third of the households have reported high levels of severe or very severe hunger, with 53% experiencing moderate hunger. Since October 7, 1,249 trucks carrying food assistance have reached Gaza. Before the war, about 500 trucks would enter the Gaza Strip daily. WFP says that to provide food assistance to the affected population in Gaza, 100 trucks with food would be required to cross inside every day.
Media rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) urged Israeli and Egyptian authorities on Thursday to allow journalists to move freely across the Gaza Strip’s southern border crossing into Egypt. The Rafah crossing was shut after Israel declared war on Hamas in Gaza following the deadliest attack in its history on October 7. While it has intermittently opened in recent weeks, only people whose names were on approved lists have been allowed out.
In a statement, RSF called for the Rafah crossing to be opened “so that journalists can finally come and go on both sides of the border”. Palestinian journalists who, like other civilians in Gaza, have had to flee their homes in the north of the Gaza Strip “are now being told by Israel to assemble at the border with Egypt, with no possibility of crossing”, RSF said. “Conversely, international reporters are prevented from entering.” The Rafah crossing is controlled by Hamas and Egypt, though RSF says Israel monitors all activities at the southern border. — Aljazeera
