A picture taken on January 5, 2024 shows Gaza City’s Al-Ghossein cemetary, damaged amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the militant group Hamas. The conflict triggered by Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack on Israel has caused massive destruction in the Gaza Strip, killing tens of thousands and leaving residents on the brink of famine. Much of the territory has become unrecognizable, as entire neighborhoods which were once bustling with people, cars and donkey-drawn carts have been reduced to rubble. (Photo by AFP)
PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES – Israel bombarded the southern Gaza Strip Thursday as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken ended a days-long regional tour aimed at preventing the Israel-Hamas war from spreading.
His final stop in Egypt coincided with a hearing at the UN’s top court over an urgent appeal for Israel to immediately suspend its military operations in the Gaza Strip.
Adila Hassim, a top lawyer for South Africa which has brought the case against Israel, said Israel’s bombing campaign aimed at the “destruction of Palestinian life” and had pushed Palestinians “to the brink of famine”.
In Cairo, Blinken met Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, whose country is a mediator in the Gaza war now in its fourth month.
Blinken’s nine-country Middle East trip concluded after Wednesday’s UN Security Council resolution that demanded Iran-backed Yemeni rebels “immediately cease” attacks which have disrupted shipping in the Red Sea and stoked fears the conflict could spread.
Violence involving Iran-backed armed groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria as well as Yemen has spiked during the war, leading to heightened fears it could spread.
“I don’t think the conflict is escalating,” and nobody wants that, Blinken told reporters on the airport tarmac at the end of his brief Cairo stop.
“Israel doesn’t. Lebanon doesn’t. I actually don’t think Hezbollah does,” he said referring to the Lebanese movement, a Hamas ally, which has exchanged regular fire with Israeli forces over their border.
South Africa accused Israel before the International Court of Justice of breaching the United Nations Genocide Convention in its response to Hamas’s October 7 attack, which triggered the war.
“No armed attack on a state territory, no matter how serious… can provide justification for or defend breaches of the convention,” said Pretoria’s Justice Minister Ronald Lamola, setting out his country’s case at the court in The Hague.
South Africa is a longtime backer of the Palestinian cause.
‘Above the law’
In Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt and overrun with displaced people fleeing fighting further north, Palestinians mourned their dead and expressed hope the ICJ could render justice on their behalf.
“Israel considers itself above the law. We ask… the international judges to judge Israel” and its government, Hisham al-Kullah said, holding a dead baby whose body was one of several to arrive at Rafah’s Al-Najjar hospital.
Another mourner, Mohammad al-Arjan, expressed hope that “the court stops the war”.
Israel, which will lay out its defenSe on Friday, has already accused South Africa of serving as Hamas’s “legal arm”.
The war began when Hamas launched its unprecedented October 7 attack, which resulted in about 1,140 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Militants also took around 250 hostages, 132 of whom Israel says remain in Gaza, including at least 25 believed to have been killed.
Israel has responded with a relentless military campaign that has killed at least 23,469 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.
Hamas’s press office said early Thursday that 62 people had been killed in strikes overnight, including around Gaza’s main southern city of Khan Yunis.
The wounded included several children who arrived at the city’s Al-Nasser hospital. A boy with a pained expression and blood down one side of his face walked in. A man carried the limp body of a girl from an ambulance.
Israel’s military said in a statement on Thursday that “underground combat” led to the discovery of more than 300 tunnel shafts under Khan Yunis, and that “Israeli hostages had been inside” one vast tunnel.
During a visit with troops in central Gaza, Israeli army chief Herzi Halevi said the militants had prepared their defenSes “over a very long period of time in a very organiZed way”, adding it is “a very, very complex battlefield”.
Makeshift clinic
The war has triggered an acute humanitarian crisis, with an Israeli siege sparking shortages of food, water, fuel and medicine.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday said there are “nearly insurmountable challenges” to aid delivery in Gaza.
“Intense bombardment, restrictions on movement, fuel shortages, and interrupted communications make it impossible for WHO and our partners to reach those in need,” he told reporters.
The WHO says only a few Gaza hospitals are even partly functioning.
In Rafah, former Gaza health ministry staffer Zaki Shaheen converted his shop into a makeshift clinic.
“We got help from the health ministry,” aiming to ease pressure on overburdened hospitals, Shaheen told AFP.
“We receive no less than 30 or 40 cases per day, morning to night. I’ll be sleeping, then someone comes in with an injury or a burn, so we treat them,” he told AFP.
The United Nations estimates 1.9 million Gazans have been uprooted by the war.
Before his final stop in Egypt, Blinken sketched out a possible post-war future for Gaza after meeting Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa.
Blinken told Abbas that Washington supported “tangible steps” towards the creation of a Palestinian state — a long-term goal that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government has opposed.
In Cairo Blinken said movement towards a Palestinian state, alongside a rapprochement between Israel and Arab countries, is the way to isolate Iran.
“There’s a path that brings Israel’s needs and desires for integration,” he said. “If you make the necessary commitment to security and you move down the path to a Palestinian state, it’s the single best way to isolate Iran and the proxies.”
Yemen’s Huthi rebels, who say they are acting in support of the Palestinians, have carried out numerous attacks on merchant ships in the Red Sea, a vital artery for international trade.
On Thursday armed men in “military-style” uniforms boarded an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman, a maritime risk management company said, before Iranian state media reported Iran’s navy had seized an American oil tanker following “a court order”.