While Israeli airstrikes and ground operations in the Gaza Strip continue unabated, AFP correspondents and witnesses have reported fierce fighting between soldiers and Hamas in Rafah and Jabaliya, respectively. the south and north of the narrow strip of land besieged by Israel.
Information to remember
⇒ Qatar criticizes Gaza operation
⇒ The United States “concerned” by accusations of torture targeting Israel
⇒ Pro-Palestinian students evacuated from the University of Geneva by the police
Qatar deplores operation in Rafah which “set back” negotiations on a truce
Israel’s military operation in Rafah has “set back” negotiations with Palestinian Hamas, lamented Tuesday the Prime Minister of Qatar, mediator in discussions for a truce in the Gaza Strip, stressing that the talks were “almost in a dead end.”
“Unfortunately, things have not been moving in the right direction, and right now we are almost at a dead end. Of course, what happened in Rafah set us back,” Prime Minister Mohammed said bin Abdelrahmane Al-Thani, during the Qatar Economic Forum.
In Rafah, civilians flee the fighting en masse
Clashes broke out on Monday between Israeli soldiers and Hamas fighters in the Gaza Strip devastated by more than seven months of war, with Palestinian civilians continuing to flee the violence, mainly in Rafah, threatened with a major offensive. In the last 24 hours, at least 57 Palestinians have been killed according to the Hamas Ministry of Health in the Palestinian territory where some 2.4 million inhabitants are crowded, most of them threatened with famine according to the UN.
According to witnesses, Israeli helicopters and artillery intervened in Rafah, where Israel is threatening to launch a large-scale ground offensive to destroy, according to it, the last Hamas battalions sheltering there. On foot, in cars or in vans, Palestinians continued to flee areas of Rafah, after dismantling their tents and taking their belongings.
US ‘concerned’ by accusations of torture targeting Israel
The United States said on Monday it was “concerned” and called on its Israeli ally to investigate after a CNN report on the degrading conditions to which certain Palestinian prisoners are said to be subjected in the midst of the war in Gaza. Based on information provided by Israeli whistleblowers, the American news channel broadcast a shocking report last week about the Sde Teiman base in the Negev desert in southern Israel .
“We are concerned about (these accusations) and are looking into them and other accusations of abuse against Palestinians in detention,” State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters. . The United States has informed the Israelis that it has an “obligation to thoroughly investigate” accusations of violations of international humanitarian law, he stressed.
Gaza: Netanyahu assures that around half of the dead are Hamas fighters
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a podcast that around half of the people killed in Gaza since the start of the war were “Hamas fighters”, ensuring that the overall toll was lower than that announced by the Islamist movement.
“Even though we are facing a particularly cynical enemy, we have managed to maintain the ratio of civilians to combatants killed” at “around one to one,” Benyamin Netanyahu told the Call Me Back podcast in an interview on Sunday.
Pro-Palestinian students evacuated from the University of Geneva
The police intervened early Tuesday morning to dislodge around fifty pro-Palestinian students who had occupied the University of Geneva (UNIGE) in Switzerland for almost a week, and refused to obey the demands of the establishment’s management, report Swiss media. Around twenty uniformed and plainclothes police officers entered the UniMail building around 03:00 GMT (05:00 local), said a journalist from the Keystone-ATS news agency present on site.
The University of Geneva (UNIGE) raised its voice on Monday after the failure of negotiations, announcing the filing of a criminal complaint for home invasion against pro-Palestinian students. Like pro-Palestinian demonstrators on several other Swiss campuses, UNIGE students demand in particular that the university take a position for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and that it put an end to its collaborations with universities and Israeli research institutes.
On the Internet, calls for boycotts of stars who have remained silent on Gaza
On social networks, calls to block the accounts of influential celebrities are intensifying, a movement which aims to sanction stars who have remained silent on the war in Gaza. American singers Beyoncé and Taylor Swift and reality TV star and businesswoman Kim Kardashian are among the targets of this pro-Palestinian mobilization. And the wave of disapproval has been growing since the recent holding of the Met Gala with great fanfare, the great annual fashion event in New York attended by the elite of showbiz.
On TikTok, the hashtag “blockout2024” had more than 30,000 publications on Monday. Videos listing the names of the gala guests and other personalities to be “blocked” received thousands of “likes”.