Hamas accepts Gaza ceasefire; Israel says it will continue talks but launches strikes in Rafah

Palestinians react after Hamas accepted a ceasefire proposal from Egypt and Qatar, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, May 6, 2024. (Reuters)
Palestinians react after Hamas accepted a ceasefire proposal from Egypt and Qatar, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, May 6, 2024. (Reuters)
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Updated 07 May 2024
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Hamas accepts Gaza ceasefire; Israel says it will continue talks but launches strikes in Rafah

Palestinians react after Hamas accepted a ceasefire proposal from Egypt and Qatar, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip.
  • Uncertain whether a deal had been sealed to bring a halt to the seven-month war in Gaza
  • Palestinians in Rafah celebrated after announcement, hoping it meant the invasion would be averted

JERUSALEM: Hamas announced its acceptance Monday of an Egyptian-Qatari ceasefire proposal, but Israel said the deal did not meet its “core demands” and that it was pushing ahead with an assault on the southern Gaza town of Rafah. Still, Israel said it would continue negotiations.
The high-stakes diplomatic moves and military brinkmanship left a glimmer of hope alive — but only barely — for an accord that could bring at least a pause in the 7-month-old war that has devastated the Gaza Strip. Hanging over the wrangling was the threat of an all-out Israeli assault on Rafah, a move the United States strongly opposes and that aid groups warn will be disastrous for some 1.4 million Palestinians taking refuge there.
Hamas’s abrupt acceptance of the ceasefire deal came hours after Israel ordered an evacuation of some 100,000 Palestinians from eastern neighborhoods of Rafah, signaling an invasion was imminent.
Israel’s War Cabinet decided to continue the Rafah operation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said. At the same time, it said that while the proposal Hamas agreed to “is far from meeting Israel’s core demands,” it would send negotiators to Egypt to work on a deal.
The Israeli military said it was conducting “targeted strikes” against Hamas in eastern Rafah. The nature of the strikes was not immediately known, but the move appeared aimed at keeping the pressure on as talks continue.
President Joe Biden spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reiterated US concerns about an invasion of Rafah. US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said American officials were reviewing the Hamas response “and discussing it with our partners in the region.” An American official said the US was examining whether what Hamas agreed to was the version signed off to by Israel and international negotiators or something else.
It was not immediately known if the proposal Hamas agreed to was substantially different from one that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken pressed the militant group to accept last week, which Blinken said included significant Israeli concessions.
Egyptian officials said that proposal called for a ceasefire of multiple stages starting with a limited hostage release and partial Israeli troop pullbacks within Gaza. The two sides would also negotiate a “permanent calm” that would lead to a full hostage release and greater Israeli withdrawal out of the territory, they said.
Hamas sought clearer guarantees for its key demand of an end to the war and complete Israeli withdrawal in return for the release of all hostages, but it wasn’t clear if any changes were made.
Israeli leaders have repeatedly rejected that trade-off, vowing to keep up their campaign until Hamas is destroyed after its Oct. 7 attack on Israel that triggered the war.
Netanyahu is under pressure from hard-line partners in his coalition who demand an attack on Rafah and could collapse his government if he signs onto a deal. But he also faces pressure from the families of hostages to reach a deal for their release.
Thousands of Israelis rallied around the country Monday night calling for an immediate agreement. About a thousand protesters swelled near the defense headquarters in Tel Aviv, where police tried to clear the road. In Jerusalem, about a hundred protesters marched toward Netanyahu’s residence with a banner reading, “The blood is on your hands.”
Israel says Rafah is the last significant Hamas stronghold in Gaza, and Netanyahu said Monday that the offensive against the town was vital to ensuring the militants can’t rebuild their military capabilities.
But he faces strong American opposition. Miller said Monday the US has not seen a credible and implementable plan to protect Palestinian civilians. “We cannot support an operation in Rafah as it is currently envisioned,” he said.
The looming operation has raised global alarm. Aid agencies have warned that an offensive will bring a surge of more civilian deaths in an Israeli campaign that has already killed 34,000 people and devastated the territory. It could also wreck the humanitarian aid operation based out of Rafah that is keeping Palestinians across the Gaza Strip alive, they say.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on Monday called the evacuation order “inhumane.”
“Gazans continue to be hit with bombs, disease, and even famine. And today, they have been told that they must relocate yet again,” he said. “It will only expose them to more danger and misery.”
Israeli leaflets, text messages and radio broadcasts ordered Palestinians to evacuate eastern neighborhoods of Rafah, warning that an attack was imminent and anyone who stays “puts themselves and their family members in danger.”
The military told people to move to an Israel-declared humanitarian zone called Muwasi, a makeshift camp on the coast. It said Israel has expanded the size of the zone and that it included tents, food, water and field hospitals.
It wasn’t immediately clear, however, if that was already in place.
Around 450,000 displaced Palestinians already are sheltering in Muwasi. The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, said it has been providing them with aid. But conditions are squalid, with few sanitation facilities in the largely rural area, forcing families to dig private latrines.
Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, condemned the “forced, unlawful” evacuation order to Muwasi.
“The area is already overstretched and devoid of vital services,” Egeland said.
The evacuation order left Palestinians in Rafah wrestling with having to uproot their families once again for an unknown fate, exhausted after months living in sprawling tent camps or crammed into schools or other shelters in and around the city. Israeli airstrikes on Rafah early Monday killed 22 people, including children and two infants.
Mohammed Jindiyah said that at the beginning of the war, he tried to hold out in his home in northern Gaza under heavy bombardment before fleeing to Rafah.
He is complying with Israel’s evacuation order this time, but was unsure whether to move to Muwasi or elsewhere.
“We are 12 families, and we don’t know where to go. There is no safe area in Gaza,” he said.
Sahar Abu Nahel, who fled to Rafah with 20 family members, including her children and grandchildren, wiped tears from her cheeks, despairing at a new move.
“I have no money or anything. I am seriously tired, as are the children,” she said. “Maybe it’s more honorable for us to die. We are being humiliated.”
Israel’s bombardment and ground offensives in Gaza have killed more than 34,700 Palestinians, around two-thirds of them children and women, according to Gaza health officials. The tally doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants. More than 80 percent of the population of 2.3 million have been driven from their homes, and hundreds of thousands in the north are on the brink of famine, according to the UN
The war was sparked by the unprecedented Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel in which Palestinian militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted some 250 hostages. After exchanges during a November ceasefire, Hamas is believed to still hold about 100 Israelis as well the bodies of around 30 others.


Israeli airstrike near Syrian capital kills 11, war monitor says

 An Israeli airstrike in the outskirts of Damascus on Sunday killed 11 people, according to a war monitor. (File/AFP)
An Israeli airstrike in the outskirts of Damascus on Sunday killed 11 people, according to a war monitor. (File/AFP)
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Israeli airstrike near Syrian capital kills 11, war monitor says

 An Israeli airstrike in the outskirts of Damascus on Sunday killed 11 people, according to a war monitor. (File/AFP)
  • Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the airstrike targeted a weapons depot that belonged to Assad’s forces near the industrial town of Adra

BEIRUT: An Israeli airstrike in the outskirts of Damascus on Sunday killed 11 people, according to a war monitor, as Israel continues to target Syrian weapons and military infrastructure even after the ouster of former President Bashar Assad.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the airstrike targeted a weapons depot that belonged to Assad’s forces near the industrial town of Adra, northeast of the capital. The observatory said at least 11 people, mostly civilians, were killed.
Beirut-based pan-Arab Al-Mayadeen TV also reported the airstrike but put the death toll at six. The Israeli military did not comment on the airstrike Sunday.
Israel, which has launched hundreds of airstrikes over Syria since the country’s uprising turned-civil war broke out in 2011, rarely acknowledges them. It says its targets are Iran-backed groups that backed Assad. Israel also wants to remove a threat posed by weapons in Syria, which is now governed by militants. 
Syrian insurgents who ousted Assad in a lightning ofensive in early December have demanded that Israel cease its airstrikes.
 


Israeli forces order new evacuation at besieged northern Gaza town, residents say

Israeli forces order new evacuation at besieged northern Gaza town, residents say
Updated 29 December 2024
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Israeli forces order new evacuation at besieged northern Gaza town, residents say

Israeli forces order new evacuation at besieged northern Gaza town, residents say
  • Israeli forces instruct Beit Hanoun residents to leave, causing new displacements
  • Palestinian officials say evacuations worsen Gaza’s humanitarian conditions

CAIRO: Israeli forces carrying out a weeks-long offensive in northern Gaza ordered any residents remaining in Beit Hanoun to quit the town on Sunday, pointing to Palestinian militant rocket fire from the area, residents said.
The instruction to residents to leave caused a new wave of displacement, although it was not immediately clear how many people were affected, the residents said.
Israel says its almost three-month-old campaign in northern Gaza is aimed at Hamas militants and preventing them from regrouping. Its instructions to civilians to evacuate are meant to keep them out of harm’s way, the military says.
Palestinian and United Nations officials say no place is safe in Gaza and that evacuations worsen humanitarian conditions of the population.
Much of the area around the northern towns of Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and Beit Lahiya has been cleared of people and razed, fueling speculation that Israel intends to keep the area as a closed buffer zone after the fighting in Gaza ends.
The Israeli military announced its new push into the Beit Hanoun area on Saturday.
The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said it had lost communication with people still trapped in the town, and it was unable to send teams into the area because of the raid.
On Friday, Israeli forces stormed the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza. The military said it was being used by militants, which Hamas denies.
The raid on the hospital, one of three medical facilities on the northern edge of Gaza, put the last major health facility in the area out of service, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a post on X.
Some patients were evacuated from Kamal Adwan to the Indonesian Hospital, which is not in service, and medics were prevented from joining them there, the Health Ministry said. Other patients and staff were taken to other medical facilities.
On Sunday, health officials said an Israeli tank shell hit the upper floor of the Al-Ahly Arab Baptist Hospital in Gaza City near the X-ray division.
Meanwhile, Palestinian health officials said Israeli military strikes across the enclave killed at least 16 people on Sunday. One of those strikes killed seven people and wounded others at Al-WAFA Hospital in Gaza City, the Palestinian civil emergency service said in a statement.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the report.
Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza has killed more than 45,300 Palestinians, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave. Most of the population of 2.3 million has been displaced and much of Gaza is in ruins.
The war was triggered by Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken to Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.


Gaza rescuers say Israeli strike on hospital kills 7

A man mourns over the body of a loved one killed in an Israeli strike on Al-Meghazi refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
A man mourns over the body of a loved one killed in an Israeli strike on Al-Meghazi refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
Updated 29 December 2024
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Gaza rescuers say Israeli strike on hospital kills 7

A man mourns over the body of a loved one killed in an Israeli strike on Al-Meghazi refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
  • Strike on Al-Wafaa Hospital came a day after the military ended a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza
  • Military also detained the hospital’s chief, Hossam Abu Safiyeh, saying he was suspected of being a Hamas militant

GAZA STRIP: Gaza’s civil defense agency said an air strike hit a hospital Sunday, killing at least seven people, while Israel said it had targeted militants at the no longer functioning facility.
“Seven martyrs and several injured people, including critical cases, have been recovered following the Israeli strike on the upper floor of Al-Wafaa Hospital in central Gaza City,” a civil defense agency statement said.
Israel’s military said it had carried out a “precise strike” targeting members of Hamas’s aerial defense unit operating from a “command and control center in a building that served in the past as the Al-Wafaa hospital.”
“The building does not currently serve as a hospital,” the military said.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the hospital was still in use.
“The Al-Wafaa Hospital is partially operational, providing care to patients with physical disabilities,” the ministry’s director general, Munir Al-Barsh, told AFP.
“The hospital had been rehabilitated and was getting ready to receive patients. Had it not been targeted by Israeli shelling today, it would have been ready to fully reopen in the next few days,” he said.
The strike on Al-Wafaa Hospital came a day after the military ended a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, an assault the World Health Organization reported left the facility empty of patients and staff.
The military also detained the hospital’s chief, Hossam Abu Safiyeh, saying he was suspected of being a Hamas militant.
Since October 6, Israel’s operations in the Palestinian territory have focused on northern Gaza, where it says its land and air offensive aims to prevent Hamas from regrouping.
However, the military has also carried out air strikes and shelling in other areas of Gaza as it presses on with its campaign against the militants.


Asma Assad barred from UK to seek cancer treatment

Asma Assad’s British passport expired in 2020. (File/AFP)
Asma Assad’s British passport expired in 2020. (File/AFP)
Updated 29 December 2024
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Asma Assad barred from UK to seek cancer treatment

Asma Assad’s British passport expired in 2020. (File/AFP)
  • UK foreign secretary says she is ‘not welcome’ in Britain
  • Former Syrian first lady’s passport expired in 2020

LONDON: Asma Al-Assad is effectively barred from returning to the UK after her British passport expired, The Times newspaper reported.

The wife of former Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad will not be able to return to her birthplace, London, despite reports that she is critically ill with leukemia.

The 49-year-old has been given a 50-50 chance of surviving the illness, according to sources.

The news comes as her father, Fawaz Akhras, a renowned cardiologist, left his work at the privately run Cromwell Hospital in Kensington, west London, to care for his daughter in Moscow, where the Assad family was granted asylum this month.

Asma Assad’s British passport expired in September 2020, and it is unclear whether UK ministers have blocked renewal or if the former first lady simply allowed the document’s validity to lapse.

Yvette Cooper, the UK home secretary, said that Assad will be prevented from entering the UK to seek treatment.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy said that the former investment banker is “not welcome” in Britain.

Asma Assad became Syria’s first lady in 2000 after marrying the country’s new president.

Leaked emails show that she ordered luxury goods in London and Paris during the civil war in her country, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

She played a key role in supporting her husband’s brutal crackdown on opposition protests during the Arab Spring in 2011.

Asma Assad reportedly fled to Moscow weeks before her husband this month during a lighting offensive by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham.

Her three children, Hafez, 23, Zein, 21, and Karim, 19, are also in Moscow, where the family own luxury properties.

Sources told The Telegraph last week that the former first lady was being kept in isolation during medical treatment.

“Asma is dying. She can’t be in the same room as anyone,” one source said.

Her father and his wife, Sahar, 75, were placed under US sanctions along with Asma’s younger brothers in 2020, although none of her family has been blacklisted by the UK.


Fourth infant dies of winter cold in Gaza as families share blankets in seaside tents

Fourth infant dies of winter cold in Gaza as families share blankets in seaside tents
Updated 29 December 2024
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Fourth infant dies of winter cold in Gaza as families share blankets in seaside tents

Fourth infant dies of winter cold in Gaza as families share blankets in seaside tents
  • Jomaa Al-Batran, 20 days old, was found with his head as “cold as ice” when his parents woke up Sunday, his father, Yehia, said
  • Baby’s twin brother, Ali, was moved to the intensive care unit of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital

DEIR AL-BALAH: A fourth infant has died of hypothermia in the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by nearly 15 months of war are huddled in tents along the rainy, windswept coast as winter arrives.
Jomaa Al-Batran, 20 days old, was found with his head as “cold as ice” when his parents woke up Sunday, his father, Yehia, said. The baby’s twin brother, Ali, was moved to the intensive care unit of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Their father said the twins were born one month premature and spent just a day in the nursery at the hospital, which like other health centers in Gaza has been overwhelmed and is only partially functioning.
He said medics told their mother to keep the newborns warm, but it was impossible because they live in a tent and temperatures regularly drop below 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) at night.
“We are eight people, and we only have four blankets,” Al-Batran said as he cradled his son’s pale body. He described drops of dew seeping through the tent cover overnight. “Look at his color because the cold. Do you see how frozen he is?”
Children, some of them barefoot, stood outdoors and watched him mourn. The shrouded infant was laid at the feet of an imam, barely larger than his shoes. After prayers, the imam took off his ankle-length coat and wrapped it around the father.
At least three other babies have died from the cold in recent weeks, according to local health officials.
A Palestinian woman is killed at home in the West Bank
A Palestinian woman was shot and killed in her home in the volatile West Bank town of Jenin, where the Palestinian Authority is carrying out a rare campaign against militants.
The family of Shatha Al-Sabbagh, a 22-year-old journalism student, said she was killed by a sniper with the Palestinian security forces late Saturday while she was with her mother and two small children. They said there were no militants in the area at the time.
A statement from the Palestinian security forces said she was shot by “outlaws” — the term it uses for local militants battling Israeli forces in recent years. The security forces condemned the shooting and vowed to investigate it.
The Western-backed Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule in parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. It is deeply unpopular among Palestinians, largely because it cooperates with Israel on security matters, even as Israel accuses it of incitement and of generally turning a blind eye to militancy.
In a statement, the Al-Sabbagh family accused the Palestinian security forces of having become “repressive tools that practice terrorism against their own people instead of protecting their dignity and standing up to the (Israeli) occupation.”
The Hamas militant group also blamed the security forces and noted that Al-Sabbagh was the sister of one of its fighters who was killed in a battle with Israeli troops last year.
Later on Sunday, hundreds of people took part in a demonstration in Jenin in support of the Palestinian security forces. The rally was organized by President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, which dominates the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian security forces launched a rare operation earlier this month in Jenin that they said was aimed at restoring law and order, while critics accuse the authority of aiding the occupation.
Violence has flared in the West Bank since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack out of Gaza triggered the war there. Israel captured the West Bank, along with Gaza and east Jerusalem, in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians want all three territories for a future state.