All posts tagged: Gaza City

Israel Launches Operation at Gaza City Hospital

Israel Launches Operation at Gaza City Hospital

Published by skeptic

Israel’s military said Monday it was conducting an operation at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, an area where it came under international criticism for a November raid. Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a statement that Israeli forces were acting Monday because senior Hamas officials were using the hospital to command attacks against Israel. “We will conduct this operation with caution and care while ensuring that the hospital continues its important function,” Hagari said. Witnesses reported airstrikes in the area of the hospital, which is the largest in the Gaza Strip, as well as the presence of Israeli tanks. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday rebuffed international pressure, vowing that Israel would push ahead with an attack on Hamas militants in Rafah near the Gaza-Egyptian border, even as cease-fire talks were set to resume in Qatar in the coming days. “No amount of international pressure will stop us from realizing all the goals of the war,” to erase any Hamas control in Gaza, Netanyahu told a Cabinet meeting in …

Israel Says It Destroyed Tunnel Network Connecting North and South Gaza City

Israel Says It Destroyed Tunnel Network Connecting North and South Gaza City

Published by Sam

Israel’s army said on February 26 that it had destroyed “large parts” of an underground tunnel system connecting north and south Gaza City. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) published this footage described as showing the tunnel system and its destruction on Monday. It said the system connected the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in south Gaza City to the Zeitoun neighborhood of the city. Ynet reported that the network was 10 km (6.2 miles) long. The IDF said the tunnels contained, “rooms … that included toilets, storage rooms for weapons and combat equipment, a branched shaft system, as well as the bodies of terrorists left in the tunnel.” The hospital is Gaza’s only cancer hospital, according to Turkish media. It has been out of service since later October when strikes hit its top floor, according to Gaza Now. The hospital’s manager said 10,000 cancer patients in Gaza have not been able to access treatment since the hospital stopped operating. Credit: IDF via Storyful Video transcript [NO AUDIO] Source link

What Was It All For?

What Was It All For?

Published by skeptic

Four months after the October 7 massacre by Hamas, Israel says it is continuing to pursue the total defeat of the Islamist group, which has ruled the Gaza Strip for 17 years. At the same time, Israel is reportedly negotiating a hostage deal built around a pause in the fighting that could extend for months—long enough to make the resumption of full-scale operations unlikely, and perhaps even to arrive at a negotiated settlement. The medium-term survival of Hamas politically and administratively now appears inevitable. If so, what has been the point of the Israeli military operation in Gaza? The conflict has, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry, claimed the lives of 27,365 Gazans and left an estimated 8,000 missing. (Israel counts some 10,000 Hamas militants among the dead.) It has produced unspeakable human suffering, including a fast-approaching famine, and rendered much of the coastal enclave uninhabitable, while setting the Middle East aflame. If Israel was inevitably going to negotiate with Hamas for the release of the remaining hostages and then pull out its troops, only …

My Hope for a Better Future in Gaza

My Hope for a Better Future in Gaza

Published by skeptic

On July 1, 2005, as I was getting into a taxi leaving my family’s home in Gaza City and heading to the United States as a 15-year-old exchange student, I poked my head out of the car’s window and told my dad to keep my room nice for when I came back. He replied, “Inshallah, it’ll be better than when you left it.” I’ve never been back to Gaza. My dad, a former United Nations physician in the Jabalia refugee camp, died in 2020; the medical care that might have saved his life was not available in Gaza. In October, an Israeli air strike destroyed my family’s home. Last month, a different air strike destroyed the building in Rafah that housed much of my mother’s family, killing dozens, and wiping out what was effectively my second home. The Israeli military operation launched in response to Hamas’s horrific October 7 attacks has done far more than degrade the group’s fighting capability. It has killed thousands of people, leveled entire neighborhoods, destroyed cities, decimated civilian infrastructure, and …

Giving Birth in Gaza – The Atlantic

Giving Birth in Gaza – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

Every morning since October 7, Nour Shath has woken up, scanned her body, and felt relief that her twin babies were still inside her. Each additional day, her doctor has told her, makes their birth less likely to require an obstetric or neonatal intervention that might not be available in Gaza. But even after those morning checks reassure her that she’s one day closer to a normal, safe delivery, Shath told me, she feels a deep, wrenching fear—one she worries she’ll transmit to her babies: “Are they feeling scared inside me?” she asks herself. She wonders whether they can sense when she cries, and whether the stress will induce premature labor. “I am a working counselor, I know how to deal with negative thoughts,” she told me by text during one of Gaza’s brief interludes of data coverage. “But I try everything without anything helping. I am under stress most of the time.” “I told my husband I don’t feel safe giving birth in Gaza,” she told me. Read: Younger than war Shath is one …

Why a Gaza Cease-Fire Is Unrealistic

Why a Gaza Cease-Fire Is Unrealistic

Published by skeptic

Humanitarian pause or cease-fire: These two proposals for arresting the fighting in the Israel-Hamas war have gained traction in recent days. President Joe Biden continues to support Israel’s campaign against Hamas but favors a pause, so as to make time for more Palestinians to move out of harm’s way and for more food, water, fuel, and medical supplies to enter into Gaza. Others, both in the United States and abroad, argue for a cease-fire, saying that enough is enough with Israel’s bombing campaign and ground operations. The approaches sound similar in name but are in fact very different. Both convey the cessation of hostilities. But a humanitarian pause is temporary, with the specific purpose of improving the humanitarian situation—in this case, to allow aid into Gaza; provide time for Palestinians to move south, away from Gaza City; and enable foreign citizens and those in need of special medical care to exit Gaza via the Rafah crossing into Egypt. A cease-fire can also be temporary but is usually meant to last for a more extended time, …

What Al-Qaeda Did to Fallujah, Hamas Did to Gaza

What Al-Qaeda Did to Fallujah, Hamas Did to Gaza

Published by skeptic

Twenty years ago, on what looked like a movie set built in the Quantico woods, I learned how to fight in a city. This faux city was called “MOUT Town.” MOUT—Military Operations in Urban Terrain—is U.S. military-speak for high-intensity urban combat, like what’s unfolding in Gaza. Tactically, MOUT was very different from the traditional combat we’d already studied in the Marine Corps. The urban battlefield was highly constricted; streets and buildings funneled us into close quarters with our enemy. Beyond every corner, window, or doorway lurked a potential ambush. Most notably, and adding a specific and complex layer to this type of warfare, civilians blended with adversaries, all played by instructors who ambushed us with paintball guns. Casualty rates in urban warfare far exceed those of other forms of combat, a fact reinforced by the dime-size paintball welts that covered my body by the end of MOUT week. Less than a year later, in November 2004, I found myself leading a 46-man rifle platoon into Fallujah, in Iraq. This battle pitted 13,000 Marines and soldiers …

RFK Jr. and the Headache of the Third-Party Candidate

RFK Jr. and the Headache of the Third-Party Candidate

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Is RFK Jr., the conspiracist scion of American political royalty, merely a nuisance, or will he present a genuine threat in 2024? First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: A Wild Card The Kennedy family is synonymous with the Democratic Party. And, for a time, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. framed his long-shot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination as that of a “Kennedy Democrat” who believes in strong unions and the middle class. But last week, he broke with the party. RFK Jr., who rose to prominence as a respected environmental lawyer before veering into conspiracism and anti-vaccine activism around 2005, said last Monday that he is now running for president as a third-party candidate. “We declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our home and who amplify our divisions,” he said, announcing his decision in …

What Is Israel Trying to Accomplish?

What Is Israel Trying to Accomplish?

Published by skeptic

Israel’s invasion of Gaza awaits the parting of clouds. Clear skies favor Israel, which dominates the airspace and wants to be able to look down to see what awaits its ground forces. The early morning yesterday brought rain, and at dawn, orange cumulus clouds rolled over the Mediterranean. Today’s forecast calls for more rain, and therefore probably another day without Israeli infantry in Gaza. Rarely has the Weather Channel been such ominous and thrilling viewing. Everyone knows the invasion is coming. Less clear is what it will ultimately bring for Palestinians. Within about a day of Hamas’s attack on October 7, an Israeli consensus emerged that no response short of total annihilation of Hamas would suffice. A second, corollary consensus didn’t take much longer: To annihilate Hamas, Israel would have to invade Gaza. Hamas has given Israel the best possible excuse to do so. Hamas hides in the civilian population, stores its weapons there, and fires those weapons from civilian areas. It does this by choice. And that gives Israel the rationale of self-defense, the …