On the 92nd day of the ongoing conflict between Hamas and Israel, relentless Israeli airstrikes continue to batter Gaza. The civilian population, lacking adequate shelter, grapples with severe shortages, all while international mediations struggle to yield tangible results.
Israel bombed southern Gaza Saturday as the UN warned the besieged Palestinian territory has been rendered “uninhabitable” by three months of war.
Top Western diplomats were in the region as part of a fresh push to boost the flow of aid into Gaza and address mounting fears of a wider conflict.
The fighting, triggered by the October 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas militants, has sent tensions soaring across the region, and shows no signs of abating with the conflict entering its fourth month on Sunday.
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Civilians in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip have borne the brunt of the violence as the scale of the destruction has triggered mass displacement and a deepening humanitarian crisis.
At least 22,722 people have been killed, most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
In a statement on Saturday, the ministry said it had recorded more than 120 deaths over the past 24 hours.
The World Health Organization says the majority of Gaza’s 36 hospitals have been put out of action by the fighting, while remaining medical facilities face dire shortages.
AFP correspondents reported Israeli strikes on the southern city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter from the fighting.
Before heading to Saudi Arabia, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called for a redoubling of peace efforts.
“Israel has declared a goal to eradicate Hamas. There must be another way to eradicate Hamas that doesn’t create so many people getting killed,” he said.
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Haniyeh Urges Blinken to Focus On Ending Israeli “aggression”
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh has called on US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to use his current Middle East tour to end Israel’s “aggression” as war rages in Gaza.
In a video message posted late Friday on Hamas’s social media channels, Haniyeh said he hoped Blinken had “learned the lessons of the last three months” during which Israel has relentlessly bombarded Gaza in an effort to destroy the Islamist group.
US support for Israel’s military campaign “has caused unprecedented massacres and war crimes against our people in Gaza,” Haniyeh said.
“We […] hope that he will be more focused this time on ending the aggression” as well as “the occupation of all Palestinian lands,” the Qatar-based Hamas chief added.
The secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation executive committee, Hussein al-Sheikh, said Gaza’s future “is determined by the Palestinian people, not Israel.”
He was responding to Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s release on Thursday of a draft plan for Gaza’s post-war governance that spoke of Palestinian “civil committees” taking gradual control, while Israel would “reserve its operational freedom of action” throughout the territory.
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Blinken Meets Erdogan in Istanbul
Washington’s top diplomat discussed the Israel-Hamas war with Turkey’s mercurial leader on Saturday.
The State Department said Blinken “emphasised the need to prevent the conflict from spreading” during more than an hour of talks with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Blinken stressed the need to “work toward broader, lasting regional peace that ensures Israel’s security and advances the establishment of a Palestinian state,” the State Department said.
Colonna Urges Iran to Stop ‘Destabilising Acts’
France’s Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna told her Iranian counterpart Saturday that “Iran and its affiliates” must stop “destabilising acts” that could spark a broader conflict in the Middle East amid the war in Gaza.
