In Hebron there are butcher shops that only sell camel meat. Located south of the West Bank and just 50 kilometers as the crow flies from Gaza, this city is historically one of the hottest spots in the occupied territory. And in war, much more. Entering and moving inside it is like playing Tetris, since the military checkpoints are not only located at the entrances, but also in the center, since it is the only Palestinian city divided in two.
About 200,000 Palestinians live in the sector called H1, administered by the Palestinian National Authority. In the H2 sector, governed by Israel, there live 35,000 Arabs and a thousand Jewish settlers, whose presence around the old town is justified because it houses the Temple of the Patriarchs, the second sacred place of Judaism, also divided in two, since the building It is at the same time the mosque of Abraham, the fourth holy place of Islam.
These thousand Jews condition the lives of the Palestinians in the sector, who are ordered by the soldiers to stay inside their homes and who receive constant attacks from the settlers. The difficulty of moving within H2 and the need to obtain daily military permits was explained to La Vanguardia yesterday by Enrique García, coordinator of Doctors Without Borders in Hebron, whose headquarters are located in H1. García worked in Gaza until the middle of last year. “We saw this coming,” he says. “Evidently, no one expected this level of violence on the strip, but we knew something was coming,” García insists.
The level of violence continued yesterday in Gaza, with bombings from north to south, which now leave 17,177 dead, although putting the precise figure – provided by the health authorities of the strip – may not make much sense because when these lines are read, that number will already be outdated. We are getting used to seeing daily new scenes of children calamitously injured in the hospitals of the strip, broadcast by Arab networks and international agencies that have local reporters in Gaza, since international journalists are prohibited from accessing them.
63 of those Palestinian journalists have already died in bombings that Israel claims are selective but that are evidently indiscriminate, as confirmed by a United Nations report that this week counted: if Israel acknowledges having launched at least 10,000 projectiles on the strip of Gaza, there is one bomb for every 220 Gazans, in a population of 2.2 million people.
Yesterday the war marked two months since the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, and the fighting already reaches the entire strip. But Prime Minister Beniamin Netanyahu did not go to Gaza but to the north to monitor the border with Lebanon, where yesterday a Hizbullah anti-tank missile killed an Israeli civilian. Netanyahu threatened the Shiite guerrillas. “If Hizbullah decides to start an all-out war, it will turn Beirut and southern Lebanon into Gaza and Khan Younis,” he declared.
Israeli troops are advancing rapidly through the strip and continue fighting heavily in Khan Younis, but they are still far from controlling Gaza. Although the Israeli media claimed yesterday that dozens of Hamas fighters have surrendered, yesterday the spokesman for Hamas in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, assured that “our people do not have the word surrender in their dictionary.” On the other hand, a video broadcast yesterday by Al Jazeera shows dozens of detained men who, according to the Arab network, were displaced people who had taken refuge in a school in Beit Lahiya, in the north of the enclave. The men appear sitting on the ground, most naked from the waist up and guarded by soldiers.
And in the midst of the climate of growing tension in the West Bank, a group of 200 ultranationalist Jews demonstrated yesterday afternoon in East Jerusalem, guarded by a strong police contingent, to demand that the Esplanade of the Mosques stop being ruled by Muslims and be under Jewish control.
