The Israeli army announced yesterday, Wednesday, that it has now transformed 30% of the Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip into a neutral zone, where it continues its destructive and deadly operations without stopping.
On the same day, the Israeli Defense Minister ruled out any possibility of humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip, where some 2,4 million Palestinians have been living under siege since the outbreak of the war, triggered by an unprecedented Hamas raid on October 7, 2023, in southern sectors of Israeli territory.
In Gaza, the civil protection reported 11 dead Palestinians, including women and children, in new airstrikes.
After a two-month truce, Israel resumed massive airstrikes on the Gaza Strip on March 18, followed by ground operations, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government believe—unlike the families of the hostages—that increased military pressure is the only way to force Hamas to return the hostages, alive or dead, remaining in Gaza to Israeli authorities.
"Around 30% of the area of Gaza has now been designated a security perimeter," the Israeli army said in a statement, aiming to extend its control over large parts of the Palestinian enclave that borders southern Israel.
The Israeli army also reported that it had struck some 1.200 "terrorist targets" (i.e. positions or fighters) from the air and carried out over 100 "targeted killings" since March 18.
For its part, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another armed Palestinian movement, however an ally of Hamas, released a video depicting an Israeli-German hostage in life, who states that his name is Rom Braslavsky, a guard, 21 years old when he was kidnapped.
In the nearly seven-minute video, which appears to have been filmed under duress, the hostage begs Mr. Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump to do everything possible to secure his release.
Hamas, which took power in the Gaza Strip in 2007 and is designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the US and the EU, is currently examining an Israeli proposal for a new ceasefire that was forwarded to it by Egyptian mediators.
Israel has not publicly presented this proposal, which is known to envisage the release of the hostages in stages.
The Israeli prime minister's office, however, reported last night that Benjamin Netanyahu held a meeting to "assess" the "hostage issue" with the "negotiating team" and the "heads of the security services."
"The Prime Minister gave instructions to continue the steps to move forward with the release of our hostages," according to the same source.
As for Hamas, a Hamas official told AFP last night that its response to the Israeli proposal was "still being prepared." He clarified, however, that for the movement, negotiating its disarmament was out of the question.
The ceasefire from January 19 to March 17 allowed 33 hostages, including eight dead, to return to Israel, and in exchange for the release of some 1.800 Palestinians from Israeli prisons.
"No humanitarian aid will enter Gaza," said Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz, whose government accuses the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas of misappropriating the aid.
Israel has been blocking any humanitarian aid from entering the Palestinian enclave since March 2, and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is calling the humanitarian situation "possibly the worst" since the start of the war.
"Gaza has been turned into a mass grave for Palestinians and those who go to help them," denounced the non-governmental organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans frontières, MSF).
“We are monitoring in real time the destruction and forced displacement of the entire population of Gaza,” said Amanda Batcherole, MSF’s emergency response coordinator in Gaza.
The October 7 attack killed 1.218 people on the Israeli side, the majority of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures. Of the 251 abducted that day, 58 remain in custody in Gaza, but 34 have been declared dead by Israeli forces.
According to the Hamas government's Health Ministry, at least 1.652 Palestinians have lost their lives since March 18. The death toll since the start of large-scale Israeli military operations 18 months ago has reached at least 51.025 dead.
"We accepted hunger, losing everything, deprivation, losing our father, our mother, relatives, but what is the fault of these children?" asked Shohair, displaced after losing her sister in an airstrike in the Gaza Strip.
Some half a million Palestinians have been displaced in the Gaza Strip since March 18, the United Nations said, while almost all residents of the area have been forced to flee the areas where they lived repeatedly since the outbreak of the war.
The small coastal enclave is facing a shortage of food, water, fuel and other essential goods, the UN and humanitarian organizations emphasize.
Source: protothema.gr
