The United Nations and aid agencies have criticized the Israeli military for cutting off a key aid route by seizing the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and southern Gaza, warning that already scarce supplies will be even more exhausted in the enclave which is on the verge of famine.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has demanded that Israel reopen two key land crossings to allow desperately needed humanitarian supplies to reach Palestinians in Gaza.
“The closure of the Rafah and Kerem Shalom (Karem Abu Salem) crossing points is particularly detrimental to an already dire humanitarian situation. They must be reopened immediately,” he said on Tuesday.
Israel seized the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing earlier Tuesday, as ceasefire talks with Palestinian group Hamas remain tenuous.
Hamas said Monday evening that it had accepted a Gaza ceasefire proposal presented by Qatari and Egyptian mediators. Israel said the proposal did not meet Israeli demands and that it would send a delegation to meet with mediators.
Guterres warned that an attack on Rafah, where more than 1.4 million displaced Palestinians are sheltering, would be “a strategic error, a political calamity and a humanitarian nightmare.”
Amnesty International has called on the international community to pressure Israel to immediately end its ground operations in Rafah and ensure unhindered access for humanitarian aid to Gaza.
The group’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, Erika Guevara-Rosas, said Israel’s long-threatened large-scale ground operation in Rafah would further worsen “the indescribable suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant visited the troops and said the Rafah operation would continue until Israel “eliminates” Hamas in Rafah and the rest of Gaza.
But he said Israel was willing to make “compromises” to bring the captives home. “If this option is removed, we will continue and ‘deepen’ the operation,” he said. “This will happen across the entire Gaza Strip – south, center and north. »
‘It’s not safe’
Red Crescent sources in Egypt said aid shipments through the Rafah crossing were completely halted on Tuesday.
“The Israeli occupation has sentenced the residents of the Gaza Strip to death,” said Hisham Edwan, spokesman for the Gaza Border Authority.
In Geneva, the spokesperson for the UN humanitarian office, Jens Laerke, declared that “panic and despair” were gripping the population of Rafah.
He said that under international law, people must be given sufficient time to prepare for an evacuation and have a safe route to a safe area with access to help. This was not the case during the Rafah evacuation, he said.
“It’s littered with unexploded ordnance, massive bombs lying around in the street. It’s not safe,” he said.
The comments come after an Israeli government spokesperson called on international organizations to evacuate areas of Rafah where military operations continue.
The spokesperson said aid continues to flow to the enclave despite the military operation.
Humanitarian groups have been warning for months that Israel’s restrictions on aid deliveries to Gaza are putting the population at risk of severe famine. Famine has already set in in the north of the territory.
Hamas has accused Israel of trying to undermine efforts to secure a ceasefire after Israel’s seven-month assault on Gaza that ravaged the Gaza Strip and left hundreds of thousands of its residents homeless and hungry. .
Israeli army footage showed tanks passing through the Rafah crossing complex and the Israeli flag being raised on the Gaza side.
Israel sends delegation to Cairo
The seizure of the Rafah crossing comes after weeks of pressure from several of Israel’s key Western allies to delay a ground attack on Rafah without a plan for the safe evacuation of civilians.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the operation along the border in eastern Rafah was not an all-out invasion of the city that President Joe Biden is fighting against. has repeatedly warned for humanitarian reasons.
He said Israel described it as “an operation of limited scale and duration” aimed at stopping alleged Hamas arms smuggling.
But many of Rafah’s residents struggled to find a safe place to go in this small strip of land that has been bombarded almost non-stop since October 7.
Families are crowded into tent camps and makeshift shelters, suffering from a lack of food, water, medicine and other basic necessities.
Residents said Israeli tanks and planes attacked several areas and houses in Rafah overnight Monday and Tuesday. Gaza’s health ministry said Israeli attacks across the enclave had killed 54 Palestinians and injured 96 others in the past 24 hours.
At least 34,789 Palestinians were killed in the attack, Gaza’s health ministry said.
Meanwhile, Guterres called on Israel and Hamas to spare no effort to reach a truce agreement.
Hamas said late Monday that it had told Qatari and Egyptian mediators handling the indirect negotiations that it had accepted a ceasefire proposal, but Israel said the conditions did not meet its demands.
However, the different actors seemed willing to talk again on Tuesday.
A team of mid-level Israeli officials will travel to Cairo in the coming hours to assess whether Hamas can be persuaded to change its latest ceasefire offer, a senior Israeli official said.
The official also reiterated that Hamas’ current proposal was unacceptable to Israel.
“This delegation is made up of mid-level envoys. If there was a credible deal in sight, the leaders would lead the delegation,” the official told Reuters news agency, referring to senior intelligence officials from Mossad and Shin Bet who lead the Israeli side .
Also on Tuesday, Hamas said in a statement that a delegation led by Khalil al-Hayya, a member of the group’s politburo, had arrived in Cairo to discuss the ceasefire proposal.
Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan confirmed that a delegation was in Cairo to continue discussions on the Egyptian-Qatari proposal, which he said came after “months of negotiations.”
Hamdan also said that the Israeli attack on the Rafah border crossing was an attempt by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to obstruct the agreement and implementation of a ceasefire.
“Invading and attacking the Rafah crossing by (Israeli forces) with Netanyahu’s predetermination is an attempt to obstruct the implementation of the agreement to end the attack on our people. This is a desperate attempt to create a pseudo-victory that can save Netanyahu’s face,” he said. “This will never be achieved.”
Any truce would be the first break in fighting since a week-long ceasefire in November in which Hamas freed dozens of prisoners and Israel released 240 Palestinians it was holding in its prisons.
Since then, all efforts to reach a new truce have failed due to Hamas’s refusal to release more prisoners without the promise of a permanent end to the conflict, and Israel’s insistence on only considering ‘a temporary pause in his assault.
