Newly released images show entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble after strikes from Israel in the war against Hamas
Newly released satellite images reveal how cities and towns in Gaza have been destroyed by almost three weeks of Israeli bombardments on the besieged enclave.
Apartment buildings are crumpled and entire neighbourhoods lie in ruins, in pictures taken before and after Israeli airstrikes and provided by Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs.
Israel has vowed to wipe out Hamas, which rules Gaza, in retaliation for the 7 October attacks in which they killed 1,400 people and took more than 200 people hostage.
Since then, Israel has continuously struck Gaza from the air, imposed a siege and is preparing a ground invasion. The Hamas-run health ministry says more than 7,000 people – many of them civilians – have been killed in the Israeli bombardment.
In the city of Beit Hanoun, which lies close to the northern border with Israel, four- and five-storey buildings are in various states of collapse. Huge chunks are missing from some, others are broken in half and two large complexes lie in piles of rubble.
Beit Hanoun lies close to one of the main crossings through which Hamas militants launched their murderous rampage through southern Israel and has been a focus of much of the Israel Defence Forces’ (IDF) firepower.
Just days into the current conflict, the Israeli air force announced that Beit Hanoun had been struck “120 times”, saying that the area served as a hub for Hamas. The results of the heavy bombardment are clear in images that show entire neighbourhoods reduced to grey wastelands.
With airstrikes continuing almost around the clock, the full extent of the damage remains unknown. Images of the Al Karameh neighbourhood north of Gaza City show the rubble of a number of residential buildings.
The UN has said that 42% of all housing units have been rendered uninhabitable in the past three weeks, with thousands more subject to moderate damage.
The destruction has increased the number of displaced people in Gaza, with the UN and Palestinian Red Crescent estimating that between 400,000 and a million Palestinians are now homeless.
Biden ultimatum to Netanyahu: protect Gaza civilians, or else
WASHINGTON, April 4 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden effectively gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an ultimatum on Thursday: protect Palestinian civilians and foreign aid workers in Gaza or Washington could rein in support for Israel in its war against Hamas militants.
The message, after months of U.S. calls for Israel to change its military tactics that have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, followed an Israeli attack that killed seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers and triggered global outrage.
Israel admits the strike was a mistake.
The White House did not say exactly what steps it wanted Netanyahu to take, nor what it would do if he failed to take them. But analysts said the implicit threat was to slow U.S. arms transfers to Israel or to temper U.S. support at the U.N.
"This is as close to a 'come to Jesus' moment as you can get," said analyst Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, referring to Biden's comment last month that he and Netanyahu were heading for such a turning point.
Dennis Ross, a veteran U.S. diplomat now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said: "The president, in effect, is saying meet these humanitarian needs or I will have no choice but to condition (military) assistance."
Biden, up for re-election in November, has struggled to balance pressure to rein in Netanyahu from progressive Democrats dismayed at the Palestinian civilian death toll against the risk that may alienate mostly pro-Israel independent voters. He has so far resisted setting conditions on arms transfers.
The war began after Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies, prompting an Israeli invasion that has laid waste to much of the densely populated territory and displaced most of its 2.3 million people.
More than 33,000 Palestinians have died, according to the health ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza, of which most were women and children. Israel accuses Hamas of using civilians as human shields.
Describing their call, the White House said Biden called for Israel "to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers.
"He made clear that U.S. policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel's immediate action on these steps," the White House added in a statement.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was more blunt.
"Look, I'll just say this: if we don't see the changes that we need to see, there will be changes in our policy."
On Thursday evening, just hours after the call, the Israeli government announced several steps to increase aid flows to Gaza, including opening the Ashdod port and the Erez crossing into northern Gaza and increasing aid deliveries from Jordan. It was not clear if the steps would be enough to satisfy U.S. demands.
TURNING POINT
The turning point for Biden, an ardent supporter of Israel, was Monday's deadly Israeli attack on the workers from celebrity chef Jose Andres' WCK charity group.
It came as the Biden administration has been stepping up pressure on Israel to consider alternatives to a threatened ground offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the last relatively safe haven for civilians in the coastal enclave.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source familiar with the talks said the 30-minute call was at times tense, with Biden spelling out his concerns and Netanyahu defending his approach on Gaza.
A senior White House official described the conversation as "very direct, very straightforward," saying it included Vice President Kamala Harris, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Blinken.
As to what the United States expects, the official said: "We need a comprehensive plan on them doing a much better job here. They can’t be killing humanitarian aid workers and civilians."
While Biden has long avoided curtailing U.S. support for Israel, he may finally have reached his limit.
"There was always going to be a point at which the Biden administration felt that the domestic and international cost of supporting Israel's campaign in Gaza outweighed the benefit of what Israel was able to achieve on the ground," said Mike Singh, a former National Security Council official on the Middle East.
"What is remarkable is not that this is happening but that it took so long."
Singh, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said if Israel did not meet Biden's conditions, the likeliest step was the U.S. negotiating a U.N. Security Council resolution like the one that ended the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict.
"Placing conditions on arms transfers is more fraught politically, would likely face stiff opposition on (Capitol) Hill, and could leave Israel vulnerable to attack by Hezbollah or other Iranian proxies," he added.
Still, Biden may have telegraphed his thinking last month when, after saying a Rafah invasion would be a "red line," he said he would never cut off "all weapons so that they don’t have the Iron Dome (missile defense system) to protect them."
He did not explicitly make such assurances about offensive weapons, fueling speculation he could impose conditions on such arms transfers to Israel, which relies heavily on U.S. arms.
Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East, said Biden was unlikely to take drastic action upending U.S.-Israeli ties, such as withholding big-ticket weapons or completely abandoning Israel at the U.N.
But he could put conditions on smaller military items and take further measures against extremist Jewish settlers involved in attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
"Biden's frustration with how the war is being conducted, and with Prime Minister Netanyahu himself, has reached an apex," Panikoff said.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/biden-ultimatum-netanyahu-protect-gaza-civilians-or-else-2024-04-05/
Israel said to offer two-month pause in Gaza fighting for staged release of hostages
Report says proposal does not heed demand by Hamas to end war but appears to go further than past Israeli offers, including significant reduction in IDF ops once fighting resumes
Israel has reportedly submitted a proposal through Qatari and Egyptian mediators that would see it agree to pause its military offensive against Hamas for as long as two months, in exchange for a phased release of the remaining 136 hostages in Gaza.
The proposal does not heed the Hamas demand for Israel to end the war completely, but does appear to go further than Israel has gone in previous offers, according to the Axios news site, which cited two Israeli officials.
The offer was publicized as White House Middle East czar Brett McGurk was in the region for meetings with Egyptian and Qatari counterparts aimed at advancing a hostage deal, a US official told The Times of Israel.
Israel is now waiting for Hamas’s response to the new proposal and is cautiously optimistic about the chance for progress in the coming days, the Israeli officials said to Axios.
The Israeli proposal reported by the news site would see the remaining children, women, men over the age of 60 and critically ill hostages released during the first stage. Subsequent stages would see female soldiers and men under the age of 60 who are not soldiers, followed by male soldiers and the bodies of hostages.
The Israeli offer states that Israel and Hamas would agree in advance as to how many security prisoners would be released by Jerusalem in each stage, before holding separate negotiations on the names of these convicts.
The offer would also include a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the main population centers in the Gaza Strip and the gradual return of Palestinians to the enclave’s north, from which they were ordered to evacuate.
The offer stipulates that Israel will not agree to end the war completely, nor release all 6,000 Palestinian security prisoners, but Israeli officials told Axios that they were willing to release a significant number.
If implemented, IDF operations in Gaza would be significantly smaller in scope after the pause concludes, Axios reported.
The offer is relatively similar to ones that have reportedly been pressed since the seven-day truce ended nearly two months ago. Hamas has insisted that it will not agree to release any hostages unless the fighting in Gaza ceases completely — a non-starter for Israel, as it would leave those who orchestrated the October 7 massacre in power, and with parts of the Hamas war machine intact.
The report followed a meeting Monday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held with the families of hostages. He told them that “contrary to what has been said, there is no real Hamas proposal,” according to a statement released by his office.
“I tell you this as clearly as I can, because there are so many untrue [claims] that must be torturing you,” the statement quoted Netanyahu as saying.
“On the other hand, we have an [Israel] initiative, and I will not elaborate,” Netanyahu added.
Channel 12 later published a recording from the meeting, in which Netanyahu could be heard saying: “There is a proposal of mine, which I also passed in the war cabinet. We conveyed it and now there is, as they say, a tug of war.
“I can’t elaborate here, but our proposal is something we have passed on to the mediators.”
More at https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-said-to-offer-two-month-pause-in-gaza-fighting-for-staged-release-of-hostages/
Videos of the port of Gaza from before the Israeli assault on the strip and after show the scale of destruction inflicted on the besieged strip.
Nearly 100,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged in Gaza since the start of Israel's assault on 7 October.
Israeli Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested that using a nuclear weapon on Gaza is "an option" and argued that there are no non-combatants in Gaza. He also stated that providing humanitarian aid to Gaza would be considered a failure. Additionally, he expressed the view that Palestinians could relocate to other places, such as Ireland or deserts, and stated that the Gaza Strip has no right to exist.
Israeli war planes thoroughly bombard Gaza before its ground forces enter for the main assault
Scenes from the massacre in the Al-Nasr neighborhood in Gaza just moments ago
Seems like Gaza has been shut out from the outside world....
Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank have distributed threatening leaflets on cars and left bloodied dolls at schools, warning Palestinians to leave or be killed.
"By God, we will descend upon your heads with a great catastrophe soon. You have the last chance to escape to Jordan in an organised manner," said one leaflet circulated on Friday in the West Bank.
"After that, we will destroy every enemy and forcefully expel you from our holy land. We are coming."
The leaflet also warned of a new "major Nakba", referencing the 1948 displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland.
In the occupied Al-Ma'rajat area near Jericho, dolls covered in red paint, ostensibly to look like blood and scare young students, were left at the entrance of a school after settlers vandalised it.
Before Hamas's suprise attack on 7 October, settlers harassed and assaulted Palestinians on a daily basis under the protection of the Israeli army, acts that have escalated in the past 20 days.
Local journalist Abdel Qader Aql told Middle East Eye that settlers are much more active and seem to be couching their attacks as revenge for Hamas's assault.
“This week alone, there were more than 10 attacks on farmers, threats, shouting, intimidation and expulsion of them from their land," he said.
One farmer was injured after settlers hit his head with a baton. "He fainted, and when he woke up, he found the settlement guard pointing a knife at him,” Aql said.
In Al-Ma'rajat area, where settlers attacked the Arab Al-Kaabna School and left the bloodied dolls, human rights defenders say settlers aim to displace residents and seize their lands.
On Thursday, Hassan Malihat from the Al-Baidar Organization for Defending Bedouin Rights told MEE that settlers threw stones at the residents’ homes in this community where 1,200 Palestinians live, and seized their livestock.
“Attacks on the Kaabna Arabs are repeated, and they filed complaints with the Israeli police to no avail," he said.
People in Gaza are dying only from bombs and strikes. Soon, many more will die from the consequences of a siege imposed on the Gaza Strip.
• Basic services are crumbling.
• Medicine is running out.
• Food and water are running out.
• The streets of Gaza have started overflowing with sewage.
"We are exhausted, enough."
Afaf Ahmed, sent a voice note telling the world what the situation is like in the Gaza Strip for the 2.2 million people living under continuous Israeli bombardment.
😥😥😥