LAST UPDATE | 30 Dec 2023
FIGHTING IS STILL raging today across Gaza, where displaced Palestinians said they were “exhausted” with no end in sight to the war between the besieged territory’s Hamas rulers and Israel, now in its 13th week.
Smoke billowed over the Gaza Strip’s southern city of Khan Yunis, the focus of recent fighting in the grinding war, which was triggered by Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October.
Further south, the border city of Rafah near Egypt was teeming with Gazans seeking safety from Israel’s relentless bombardment in its fight against Palestinian militants.
“Enough with this war! We are totally exhausted,” Umm Louay Abu Khater, a 49-year-old woman who had fled her home in Khan Yunis, taking refuge in Rafah, said.
“We are constantly displaced from one place to another in cold weather,” she said. “The bombs keep falling on us day and night.”
The Israeli army kept up its campaign in the face of mounting international pushback, reporting “fierce battles” and air strikes across the Palestinian territory.
The fighting began with Hamas’s bloody 7 October attacks, which left about 1,140 people dead in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Militants also took about 250 people hostage, and Israel says 129 of them remain in captivity.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says the Israeli military campaign has killed at least 21,672 people, mostly women and children.
A ministry statement on Saturday said 165 Gazans were killed over the previous 24 hours.
The Israeli army says 168 soldiers have been killed in combat inside the territory.
An AFP correspondent reported continuous shelling of Rafah and Khan Yunis overnight, and the health ministry said “multiple” people had died in a strike on a house in Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza.
‘Year of destruction’
Medics in Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis said they were facing severe shortages.
“The hospital is receiving a lot more (patients) than its capacity, in fact we are functioning at 300% of our… capacity,” doctor Ahmad Abu Mustafa said in footage shared by the World Health Organization (WHO).
“The beds are full… and we are basically short on all sorts of medicine supplies.”
The health ministry appealed to the international community for more support, including greater assistance in evacuating more patients.
The fighting has put 23 hospitals and 53 health centres out of service, while 104 ambulances have been destroyed, the ministry said.
In central Gaza’s Zawayda, Palestinians pulled the body of a child from under the rubble after an Israeli strike.
“We pulled (out) nine martyrs, who were members of a very peaceful family. Two adjacent houses were targeted,” the area’s civil defence director, Rami al-Aidi, said.
In Deir al-Balah, farther south, slain reporter Jabr Abu Hadrous was laid to rest.
“Palestinian journalists are killed, arrested and prosecuted,” said fellow journalist Basel Khalaf, calling on the international community to “stand by Palestinian journalists, not only in words but also in actions”.
In north Gaza, the Israeli army said dozens of “terrorists” were killed in Gaza City and “two Hamas military compounds were dismantled” in Beit Lahia.
Ahmed al-Baz, a 33-year-old Palestinian displaced from Gaza City, said this year had been “the worst in my life”.
“It was a year of destruction and devastation,” he said in Rafah, surrounded by tents in a makeshift camp.
“We just want the war to end, and start the new year at home, with a ceasefire declared.”
Mediation efforts
International mediators — who last month brokered a one-week truce that saw more than 100 hostages released and some aid enter Gaza — continue in their efforts to secure a new pause in fighting.
US news outlet Axios and Israeli website Ynet, both citing unnamed Israeli officials, reported that Qatari mediators had told Israel that Hamas was prepared to resume talks on new hostage releases in exchange for a ceasefire.
And a Hamas delegation was in Cairo on Friday to discuss an Egyptian plan proposing renewable ceasefires, a staggered release of hostages for Palestinian prisoners, and ultimately an end to the war, sources close to Hamas say.
Islamic Jihad, another armed group fighting alongside Hamas, said on Saturday that Palestinian factions were “in the process” of evaluating the Egyptian proposal.
A response will come “within days, and the brothers in Egypt will be informed”, according to Muhammad al-Hindi, Islamic Jihad’s deputy secretary-general.
Israel has yet to formally comment on the Cairo plan, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told families of hostages on Thursday that “we are in contact” with the Egyptian mediators.
The United States announced on Friday it had approved a $147.5 million (about €133.6 million) sale of 155mm high-explosive artillery munitions and related equipment to Israel under an emergency provision.
Hamas today said the sale was “clear evidence of the American administration’s full sponsorship of this criminal war”.
An Israeli siege imposed after 7 October, following years of crippling blockade, has led to dire shortages of food, safe water, fuel and medicine in Gaza, with aid convoys offering only sporadic relief.
On Friday, a total of 72 aid trucks, most of them carrying food, entered Gaza, according to the territory’s border crossings authority.
Gaza also received four fuel trucks and 29 commercial food trucks, it said.
The UN says more than 85% of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have fled their homes.
South Africa on Friday filed an application at the International Court of Justice to start proceedings for what it said were “genocidal acts” in Gaza, which Israel dismissed as “blood libel”.
The Gaza war has intensified tensions across the region.
Israel has traded regular cross-border fire with Lebanon’s powerful Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, and early on Saturday the army said it had carried out strikes in Syria following rocket launches.
The bombardment killed two fighters from a Hezbollah-linked group, Britain-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
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