There are butchers in Hebron that only sell camel meat. Located in the south of the West Bank and only 50 kilometers in a straight line from Gaza, this city is historically one of the hottest spots in the occupied territory. And, in war, much more. Entering and moving inside is like playing Tetris, because the military checkpoints are not only 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, 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, Judaism’s second holiest site, also split in two, since the building is also the mosque of Abraham, the fourth holiest place in Islam.
These thousand Jews condition the lives of the Palestinians in the sector, who are ordered by the soldiers to stay indoors 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 in H1. García worked in Gaza until the middle of last year. “We saw it coming”, he says. “Obviously, no one expected this level of violence in the strip, but we knew something was coming,” insists García.
The level of violence continued yesterday in Gaza, with bombardments from north to south, which have already killed 17,177, although saying the precise figure – provided by the health authorities of the strip – may not make much sense because, when these lines are read, the number will already be out of date. We are getting used to seeing daily new scenes of calamitously injured children in the strip’s hospitals, broadcast by Arab channels and international agencies, which have local reporters in Gaza, since international journalists are forbidden access.
63 of these Palestinian journalists have already died in bombardments that Israel claims are selective but which are evidently indiscriminate, as confirmed by a UN report that this week did the math: if Israel admits to having launched at least 10,000 projectiles on the Strip, it is up to one bomb for every 220 inhabitants of Gaza, in a population of 2.2 million people.
Yesterday, the war completed two months since the terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7, and the fighting is already reaching the entire strip. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not go to Gaza, but to the north, to monitor the border with Lebanon, where an Israeli civilian was killed yesterday by a Hezbollah anti-tank missile. Netanyahu threatened the Shia guerrillas. “If Hezbollah decides to start an all-out war, it will turn Beirut and southern Lebanon into Gaza and Khan Iunis,” he declared.
Israeli troops are advancing rapidly through the Strip and continue to battle heavily in Khan Iunis, but are still far from controlling Gaza. Although the Israeli media assured yesterday that dozens of Hamas fighters have surrendered, yesterday the spokesman of Hamas in Lebanon, Ossama Hamdan, assured that “our people do not have the word surrender in their dictionary”. On the other hand, a video released yesterday by Al-Jazeera shows dozens of arrested men who, according to the Arab channel, would be displaced people who had taken refuge in a school in Beit Lahiya, north of the enclave. The men appear sitting on the ground, mostly naked from the waist up and guarded by soldiers.
And, amid the climate of growing tension in the West Bank, a group of 200 ultra-nationalist Jews demonstrated yesterday afternoon in East Jerusalem, guarded by a strong police contingent, to demand that the Esplanade of the Mosques cease to be governed by Muslims and pass to Jewish control.