The Palestinians of the West Bank are glued to Al-Jazeera to follow the war and yesterday, in Ramallah, they saw with hope the signs that a ceasefire agreement will be reached in the next few hours. The truce would last five days and, in return, Hamas would release an undetermined number of hostages. However, as of last night there was still no official confirmation on the matter.
“We are closer than we have been in quite some time, perhaps closer to closing this deal than we have been since the beginning of this process,” declared yesterday the US Deputy National Security Adviser, Jon Finer, who he added that the hostage release could include Israel releasing an also unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners, as demanded by Hamas. “We are thinking of suspending the fighting for a few days so that we can get the hostages out,” said Israel’s ambassador to the US, Michael Herzog.
Rumors of an imminent ceasefire – which Russia and Iran also called for yesterday – soared after US President Joe Biden spoke by phone on Friday with Tamim bin Hamad al Thani, Emir of Qatar, a country that it mediates between Israel and Hamas, whose leaders live in Doha.
Western powers continue to pressure Netanyahu to stop the bombing of Gaza. Yesterday it was the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who told the prime minister by phone that there have already been “too many civilian casualties”.
Netanyahu is also facing increasing pressure from the families of the hostages, from whom he will receive a delegation in Jerusalem today.
For his part, the head of EU diplomacy, Josep Borrell, recalled that the resolution approved last week by the UN Security Council to establish humanitarian pauses and corridors “is binding and must be implemented”. As if the United Nations did not accumulate a long list of approved and unfulfilled resolutions.
As long as the cease-fire does not come, Israeli slaughter continues and does not discriminate between terrorists and civilians, including humanitarian workers. Médecins Sans Frontières reported that the army had “deliberately” attacked one of its convoys when it was trying to evacuate 137 people to the south of the strip, one of whom died. In addition, seven journalists or media personnel were added yesterday to the blacklist of 40 news workers killed by the Israeli offensive, according to the Palestinian Union of Journalists.
And once again, the Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres, was “shocked” yesterday, this time by the dozens of deaths caused by Saturday’s bombings at two schools run by the United Nations.
Regarding the situation at the Al-Xifa hospital in Gaza City, the army announced yesterday that they had found a tunnel 55 meters long and 10 meters deep under the most important health center in the strip. Israel released a video showing footage of the tunnel, allegedly from Hamas, a week after taking control of the site.
Meanwhile, in Ramallah, a large banner hangs in Al Manara Square. Its design, with dozens of images of faces – mostly children – is reminiscent of the photo collage of the 240 kidnapped by Hamas that can be seen all over Israel. But no, the faces on the poster in the center of the West Bank capital correspond to a handful of the nearly 13,000 Palestinians killed in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. “We are not numbers”, reads the banner, written in English and Arabic.
A torrential rain fell yesterday on Ramallah, where the Palestinian National Authority (PA) is based, chaired by Mahmud Abbas, against whom the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, charged on Sunday, after the Palestinian government abounded in the journalistic information that assures that an Israeli helicopter killed some of the young people who died on October 7 at the electronic party in the desert, with a border with Gaza. “Abu Mazen – popular name of Abbas -, who in the past denied the existence of the Holocaust, today denies the existence of the slaughter of Hamas and this is unacceptable,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
This reporter could not find anyone in Ramallah who defended the Hamas attack. Nor the Israeli bombings. All the residents of the West Bank consulted by La Vanguardia want the war to end as soon as possible and do not believe that it will spread to this other occupied territory because they agree that Hamas does not paint much here and that, moreover, the groups Palestinian armed forces – with a presence mainly in Jenin, Nablus and Hebron – do not have the military capacity of the Islamist organization that Israel is trying to annihilate in Gaza at any cost, in Palestinian lives.