As Hamas suspends evacuation
The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) on Sunday said the evacuation of some 20 Filipinos from strife-torn Gaza will be delayed following spate of attacks along the route to the Egyptian border.
The announcement from the DFA came as the Hamas government in Gaza suspended the evacuation of foreign passport holders to Egypt Saturday when Israel refused to allow some wounded Palestinians to be evacuated to Egyptian hospitals.
“No foreign passport holder will be able to leave the Gaza Strip until wounded people who need to be evacuated from hospitals in north Gaza are transported through the Rafah crossing” to Egypt, a border official said on condition of anonymity.
Israel believes Hamas will try to sneak its wounded fighters into Egypt under the cover of the evacuation.
DFA Undersecretary Eduardo de Vega said the 20 Filipinos along with other foreign nationals should have exited through the Rafah crossing border this weekend, but a spate of attacks foiled this plan.
“The evacuation of foreign citizens from Gaza yesterday—Saturday—did not push through, because Hamas launched some attacks, then they blamed each other,” De Vega said in an interview.
He said Israel accused Hamas of attacking the border, while Hamas claimed that Israel was attacking convoys headed to the border.
The 20 Filipinos who were supposed to leave Gaza on Saturday were supposed to be followed by 26 more.
De Vega said 115 Filipinos initially wanted to cross the Rafah border, but some of them backed out upon knowing that they could not bring their Palestinian relatives or spouses with them.
“So far, not many Filipinos want to cross [the border]. There used to be many. Now only a few want to, about 46 Filipinos,” De Vega said, in an interview with radio DzBB.
Only two Filipinos who work in Gaza, both volunteers for Doctors Without Borders, have already crossed the border to Egypt.
The Philippine Embassy in Tel Aviv is trying to convince the Israeli government to allow some 38 Palestinian spouses to leave with their Filipino spouses.
Nonetheless, De Vega said he hoped that Filipinos would take advantage of the opening of the Egyptian border.
“It is better for them to cross the border now that there is permission,” he said, adding that permission to cross the border is up to the governments of Israel and Egypt.
“They can go back to their spouses when the war is over instead of dying there,” he said.
The DFA has raised crisis alert level 4, or mandatory repatriation, over the Gaza Strip amid the fighting there between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Hamas group.
Israel has been bombarding Gaza after Hamas launched a deadly attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, and taking more than 200 hostages back to Gaza.
An Egyptian security source confirmed that “no wounded person or holder of a foreign passport arrived at the Egyptian terminal” of Rafah on Saturday.
He said the evacuation was suspended “after the bombing of ambulances transporting injured people who were on their way to the Egyptian terminal.”
On Friday, the Israeli army announced it had struck an ambulance outside Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest, saying it was “used by a Hamas terrorist cell.”
At least 15 people were killed and 60 wounded in the strike, according to the health ministry in Gaza.
Israel launched a war against Hamas in Gaza following the Oct. 7 attacks which claimed 1,400 lives — mostly civilians — according to Israel.
The Hamas-run health ministry says air, land and sea attacks on Gaza have killed nearly 9,500 Palestinians.
Israel pressed its war to crush Hamas on Sunday nearly a month after the deadliest attack in the country’s history as the Palestinian militant group said strikes on a central Gaza refugee camp killed dozens.
Ground battles
Ground battles raged in the north of the densely populated Gaza Strip, despite calls for a ceasefire from Arab countries and from desperate civilians after 30 days of a war that has killed thousands, mostly civilians.
Israeli troops were seen engaged in house-to-house battles as tanks and armored bulldozers churned through the sand in footage released by the army on the campaign to tighten the encirclement of Gaza City, still home to hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Since the shock Hamas attack of Oct. 7, Israel has relentlessly bombarded the besieged Gaza Strip, leveling entire city blocks.
In a video taken from Israel’s Sderot along the border with the Gaza Strip, an Israeli flag was seen raised on top of a destroyed building.
As the war ground into its fifth week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was on a Middle East tour Sunday and headed to Turkey, voicing support for its ally Israel while also urging “humanitarian pauses” and seeking to prevent a wider regional conflagration.
Since Israel sent ground forces into the north of the narrow Palestinian territory late last month, “over 2,500 terror targets have been struck” by “ground, air and naval forces,” the army said on Sunday.
Soldiers were engaged in “close-quarters combat”, it said, as Israeli jets were striking targets including a “Hamas military compound” overnight in the north of Gaza, vast areas of which have been reduced to a wasteland of rubble.
Leaflets dropped by the army again urged Gaza City residents to evacuate south between 10 a.m. (0800 GMT) and 2 p.m. (1200 GMT), a day after a US official said at least 350,000 civilians remained in and around the city that is now an urban war zone.
In the latest strikes in Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry said, Israeli bombing of Al-Maghazi refugee camp late Saturday killed 45 people, with an eyewitness reporting children dead and homes smashed.
“An Israeli air strike targeted my neighbor’s house in Al-Maghazi camp, my house next door partially collapsed,” said Mohammed Alaloul, 37, a journalist working for the Turkish Anadolu Agency. With AFP
Alaloul said his 13-year-old son, Ahmed, and his 4-year-old son, Qais, were killed in the bombing, along with his brother. His wife, mother and two other children were injured.
A military spokesperson said they were looking into whether their forces had been operating in the area at the time of the bombing.
More than 240 Israeli and foreign hostages were abducted by Hamas, officials say, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rebuffed proposals of a truce until the Islamist group releases them all.
Tide of anger
Blinken faced a rising tide of anger in meetings with Arab foreign ministers in Jordan on Saturday, where he reaffirmed US support for “humanitarian pauses” to ensure desperate civilians get help, a day after Netanyahu gave the idea short shrift.
Blinken was later headed to Turkey whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has held Netanyahu personally responsible for the growing civilian death toll in Gaza.
Turkey on Saturday said it was recalling its ambassador to Israel and breaking off contacts with Netanyahu.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, whose country has been acting as the sole conduit for foreigners to escape the Gaza Strip and for aid to get in, called for an “immediate and comprehensive ceasefire.”
The call was echoed by thousands of protesters in Washington in solidarity with Palestinians, one of multiple rallies held from Indonesia to Iran as well as in European cities.
“The violence in Gaza has been prolonged and indiscriminate — it’s not a war but a massacre,” 27-year-old Indonesian protester Dwi Nurfitriani said during a march in Jakarta. “So, if we consider ourselves human, let’s step in and reject all of the violence.”
Thousands also demonstrated in Israel on Saturday as pressure mounts on Netanyahu over his government’s lack of preparedness for the Oct. 7 attacks and its handling of the hostage crisis.
In Tel Aviv, several thousand took to the streets, including relatives and friends of some of the hostages, chanting: “Bring them home now.”
In Jerusalem, hundreds came together outside Netanyahu’s residence with more explicit calls for his resignation.
Hamas said late Saturday the evacuation of dual nationals and foreigners from Gaza was being suspended until Israel lets some wounded Palestinians reach Rafah so they can cross the border for hospital treatment in Egypt.
A senior White House official said Hamas had tried to use a US-brokered deal opening the Egyptian border crossing to get its cadres out.
“That was just unacceptable to Egypt, to us, to Israel,” the official said.
Hezbollah warning
In the north of Israel, the army and Lebanon’s powerful Iran-backed Hezbollah movement again traded fire across the border on Saturday, with each claiming to have hit the other’s positions.
The skirmishes came after Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah warned that the war could draw in other forces in a regional conflict.
Blinken on Saturday held talks in Amman with his counterparts from Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, all key players in the crisis.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II underlined that “the only way to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is to work towards a political horizon to achieve a just and comprehensive peace based on the two-state solution”.
The US administration has said that it too backs a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but Netanyahu’s hard-right government is implacably opposed. With AFP