While awaiting a possible truce agreement, violence has escalated for several days in the Palestinian enclave besieged and devastated by nearly fifteen months of war. The Gaza emergency services reported this Sunday, January 5, at least 23 deaths in Israeli strikes on the Palestinian territory, where the army claims to have targeted around a hundred “terrorist targets” despite the resumption of negotiations for a truce in the Gaza Strip.
Indirect discussions between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas have just resumed in Qatar with a view to a ceasefire and the release of hostages held in the Gaza Strip.
At dawn, at least 11 people, including children and women, were killed in an airstrike on a house in the north of the enclave, according to Gaza Civil Defense. “Rescuers are still searching for five people trapped under the rubble, said Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal. They work with their bare hands due to lack of adequate equipment.”
Several other Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip, in the north, center and south, caused 12 additional casualties, local emergency services said. “The (Israeli) occupation uses the false pretext of the presence of fighters to carry out violent airstrikes,” denounced a spokesperson for Civil Defense.
A participant in the October 7 attack eliminated according to Israel
The Israeli army announced that it had ‘hit more than 100 terrorist targets’ et “eliminated dozens of Hamas terrorists” in the space of two days, Friday and Saturday, in Gaza. She also claimed to have “eliminated” a commander of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement, Saed Saeed Zaki Dahnoun, having participated in the attack of October 7, 2023 on Israeli soil, at the origin of the war.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened on Wednesday to intensify strikes on Gaza if Hamas continued to fire rockets at Israel, which said it had been targeted almost daily for more than a week.
In Doha, nothing is filtering for the moment from the ongoing discussions concerning the Gaza Strip, where no truce has been concluded since that of a week at the end of November 2023, despite the diplomatic efforts carried out under the aegis of the Qatar, Egypt and the United States.
“We have hopes, they are slim, that an agreement can be reached between Israel and Hamas, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot declared on RTL radio on Sunday. We continue to exert the pressure necessary to make this happen. Unfortunately, it doesn’t just depend on us.”
Among the main sticking points so far have been the permanent nature or not of a ceasefire and the governance of Gaza after the war, Israel categorically opposing Hamas being able to rule the territory again. This new round of exchanges in Qatar comes just over two weeks before the inauguration, on January 20, of American President-elect Donald Trump, who has already put pressure on the Palestinian movement.
Source: www.liberation.fr
