Almost at the same time that Israel returned to bomb Gaza this Friday, the large green doors that give access to the esplanade of the Mosques of Jerusalem, the third sacred place of Islam, opened. The usual controls these days in the Old City are multiplied by ten every Friday to avoid the slightest incident. “Muslim?” ask the agents, equipped on every corner as if they were soldiers, asking for documentation or frisking them if they have the slightest doubt. On the Islamic holy day, like Saturday, access to the esplanade is prohibited for non-Muslims.
After noon, the jumu’ah, a special Friday prayer, floods through the loudspeakers at the adjacent Wailing Wall, where at that time many Jews pray on the eve of the Sabbath. In front of the wall, it doesn’t seem like these holy lands are at war, except for the detector arch and the scanner that you have to pass through to enter for too many years now.
When three Muslims with the prayer rug on their shoulders return from praying jumu’ah at the Al Aqsa mosque through the alleys of the Muslim quarter, Arab television has not yet begun to broadcast the unbearable images left this Friday by the resumption of the war, after seven days of truce, in which Hamas freed 105 hostages and Israel freed 240 prisoners who, as they say in the West Bank, will soon return to prison.
Khan Yunis and Rafah, in the south of the strip, were the cities hardest hit by Israeli drone bombings. Television images showed many injured people being rescued from the rubble or already in hospitals, where several small children, bloody and dusty, shared a stretcher between cries of pain and despair. The Gaza Health Ministry spoke of at least 178 deaths. After the truce, the death toll is once again in a tragic upward movement. Nearly 15,000, a third of them minors.
The Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, boarded one of the helicopters that participated in the attack this Friday and flew over Gaza to see the effects of it. “The results are impressive; Hamas only understands force,” Gallant declared. The return to fighting included tough ground clashes with tanks and soldiers fighting street by street, according to army images. At the same time, Palestinian guerrillas also launched rockets against Israel, which were intercepted by the anti-missile shield. The alarms sounded again in the central area of ??the country.
In the midst of the offensive, the spokesman for the Gaza Government – ??in the hands of Hamas –, Ismail al Thawabta, appeared in the street, accusing Israel of “genocide” and asking international organizations to help protect the hospitals in the strip. . Al Thawabta assured that the humanitarian aid received during the ceasefire barely covered “one percent of the population’s needs.” In this sense, the end of the truce also meant that Israel prohibited the entry of trucks with food, materials and fuel, which were paralyzed at the Rafah crossing, on the border with Egypt.
In the morning, the army had ordered the evacuation of Khan Younis and other areas of central Gaza, and asked its residents to go further south, towards Rafah, a city that was also bombed. Regarding the forced displacements in the strip, which affect 80% of a population of two million, the Reuters agency published this Friday that Israel has informed Egypt, Jordan and the Emirates that, after the war, it has a plan to create a zone buffer zone in Gaza, which would mean permanently occupying a portion of the enclave and reducing Palestinian territory. “Israel wants this buffer zone between Gaza and Israel from north to south to prevent Hamas or other militants from infiltrating or attacking Israel,” an unnamed senior security official from one of those three countries told Reuters. This plan generated unrest in Arab countries.
On the other hand, The Wall Street Journal reported another plan that Israel would have prepared, in this case to assassinate the leadership of Hamas, whose main leaders are in Qatar, but also in Lebanon or Turkey. According to the newspaper, Prime Minister Beniamin Netanyahu has already given the order to Mossad to execute the plan as soon as the war ends.
Netanyahu announced the end of the ceasefire with a statement saying that “the terrorist organization Hamas-ISIS” had violated the truce agreement. Although there had already been several non-compliances by Hamas on Thursday, the premier said that the trigger was that the Islamist group did not provide before 7 a.m. this Friday – when the truce expired – the list of hostages it had to release this Friday.
Despite everything, the White House assured that there are still negotiations, with Qatar and Egypt as intermediaries, for a new ceasefire.
