Hamas blames Israeli settlers for the 'desecration' of Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, part of a series of provocations.
Tag: Gaza
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Packed Gaza Hospitals Warn That Thousands Could Die As Supplies Run Low And Ground Offensive Looms
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — Medics in Gaza warned Sunday that thousands could die as hospitals packed with wounded people run desperately low on fuel and basic supplies. Palestinians in the besieged coastal enclave struggled to find food, water and safety ahead of an expected Israeli ground offensive in the war sparked by Hamas’ deadly attack.
Israeli forces, supported by a growing deployment of U.S. warships in the region, positioned themselves along Gaza’s border and drilled for what Israel said would be a broad campaign to dismantle the militant group. A week of blistering airstrikes have demolished entire neighborhoods but failed to stem militant rocket fire into Israel.
The Gaza Health Ministry said 2,329 Palestinians have been killed since the fighting erupted, more than in the 2014 Gaza war, which lasted over six weeks. That makes this the deadliest of the five Gaza wars for both sides. More than 1,300 Israelis have been killed, the vast majority of them civilians killed in Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault. This is the deadliest war for Israel since the 1973 conflict with Egypt and Syria.
A Palestinian girl wounded during an Israeli airstrike receives medical treatment at al-Aqsa hospital in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza Strip, Sunday, Oct. 15, 2023. (AP Photo/Adel Hana) Hospitals are expected to run out of generator fuel within two days, according to the U.N., which said that that would endanger the lives of thousands of patients. Gaza’s sole power plant shut down for lack of fuel after Israel completely sealed off the 40-kilometer-long (25-mile-long) territory following the Hamas attack.
In Nasser Hospital, in the southern town of Khan Younis, intensive care rooms are packed with wounded patients, most of them children under the age of 3. Hundreds of people with severe blast injuries have come to the hospital, where fuel is expected to run out by Monday, said Dr. Mohammed Qandeel, a consultant at the critical care complex.
There are 35 patients in the ICU who require ventilators and another 60 on dialysis. If fuel runs out, “it means the whole health system will be shut down,” he said, as children moaned in pain in the background. “All these patients are in danger of death if the electricity is cut off.”
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of pediatrics at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, said it did not evacuate despite Israeli orders. There are seven newborns in the ICU hooked up to ventilators, he said. “We cannot evacuate, that would mean death for them and other patients under our care.”
Patients keep arriving with severed limbs, severe burns and other life-threatening injuries. “It’s frightening,” he said.
The Shifa hospital in Gaza City, the territory’s largest, said it would bury 100 bodies in a mass grave as an emergency measure after its morgue overflowed, with relatives unable to bury their loved ones. Tens of thousands of people seeking safety have gathered in the hospital compound.
A child wounded in Israeli military strikes is brought to Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Friday, Oct. 13, 2023. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair) Gaza was already in a humanitarian crisis due to a growing shortage of water and medical supplies caused by the Israeli siege. With some bakeries closing, residents said they were unable to buy bread. Israel has also cut off water, forcing many to rely on brackish wells.
Israel has ordered more than 1 million Palestinians — almost half the territory’s population — to move south. The military says it is trying to clear away civilians ahead of a major campaign against Hamas in the north, where it says the militants have extensive networks of tunnels, bunkers and rocket launchers. Hamas urged people to stay in their homes.
The U.N. and aid groups say the mass exodus within Gaza, along with Israel’s complete siege, will cause untold human suffering. The World Health Organization said the evacuation “could be tantamount to a death sentence” for the more than 2,000 patients in northern hospitals.
The military said Sunday that it would not target a single route south between 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., again urging Palestinians to leave the north en masse. The military offered two corridors and a longer window the day before. It says hundreds of thousands have already fled south.
The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees says an estimated 1 million people have been displaced in Gaza in a single week.
The U.S. has been trying to broker a deal to reopen Egypt’s Rafah crossing with Gaza to allow Americans and other foreigners to leave and humanitarian aid amassed on the Egyptian side to be brought in. The crossing, which was closed because of airstrikes early in the war, has yet to reopen.
Israel has said the siege will only be lifted when the captives are returned.
Hundreds of relatives of the estimated 150 people captured by Hamas in Israel and taken to Gaza gathered outside the Israeli Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv late Saturday, demanding their release.
“This is my cry out to the world: Please help bring my family, my wife and three kids,” said Avihai Brodtz of Kfar Azza. Many expressed anger toward the government, saying they still have no information about their loved ones.
In southern Israel, residents of the town of Sderot, one of several communities targeted in the Hamas rampage, were boarding buses for other parts of the country to escape continuing rocket fire. Thousands have already left under a state-sponsored program that puts them in hotels elsewhere in the country.
“The kids are traumatized, they can’t sleep at night,” Yossi Edri told Channel 13 before boarding a bus.
The military said Sunday an airstrike in southern Gaza had killed a Hamas commander blamed for the killings at Nirim, one of several communities Hamas had attacked in southern Israel. Israel said it struck over 100 military targets overnight, including command centers and rocket launchers.
In the north, meanwhile, Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon fired an anti-tank missile toward an Israeli army post and Israel responded with artillery fire. Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said a 40-year-old man was killed, without giving his nationality. Israel later closed off areas up to 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) from the border and ordered civilians within 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) to shelter in safe rooms.
An Israeli mobile artillery unit fired a shell from southern Israel towards the Gaza Strip, in a position near the Israel-Gaza border, Israel, Saturday, Oct. 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Maya Allerruzzo) Israel and Hezbollah, which fought a devastating war in 2006, have traded fire along the border several times since the start of the latest Gaza war.
Israel has called up some 360,000 military reserves and massed troops and tanks along the border with Gaza. Israelis living near the Gaza border, including residents of the town of Sderot, continued to be evacuated. Militants in Gaza have fired over 5,500 rockets since the hostilities erupted, many reaching reaching deep into Israel, as Israeli warplanes pound Gaza.
In a televised address Saturday night, Israel’s chief military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said “we are going to attack Gaza City very broadly soon,” without giving a timetable for the attack.
When asked at a press briefing whether Israel would treat civilians who stay in the north as combatants, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, another army spokesman, said: “That’s why we’ve encouraged people not involved with Hamas to move south.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said late Saturday that the U.S. was moving a second carrier strike group, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the eastern Mediterranean, in a show of force meant to deter Hamas allies like Iran and Hezbollah from seeking to widen the war.
Hamas remained defiant. In a televised speech Saturday, Ismail Haniyeh, a top official based abroad, said that “all the massacres” will not break the Palestinian people.
Hamas spokesperson Jihad Taha told The Associated Press in Beirut that Israel “does not dare to fight a ground battle,” because of the captives. He alluded to the possible entry of Hezbollah and other regional players in the battle should Israel launch a ground invasion but declined to say whether they had made any concrete commitments.
Kullab reported from Baghdad, Krauss reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Julia Frankel in Jerusalem, Abby Sewell in Beirut and Samy Magdy in Cairo contributed to this report.
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Gaza conditions a ‘complete catastrophe,’ official warns as Israel prepares for imminent offensive | CNN
Gaza and Jerusalem
CNN
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Conditions in Gaza have deteriorated into a “complete catastrophe,” according to one official, with serious shortages of clean water and food as tens of thousands of Palestinians attempt to flee crippling airstrikes and an imminent Israeli ground offensive.
Israel’s military said Saturday its forces are readying for the next stages of the war, including “combined and coordinated strikes from the air, sea and land” in response to the unprecedented October 7 terrorist attacks by the Islamist militant group Hamas, which controls the enclave.
At least 1,300 people were killed during Hamas’ rampage in what US President Joe Biden described as “the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust.”
Further escalation of the long-running conflict now increasingly risks spilling over regionally, prompting the Pentagon to order a second carrier strike group and squadrons of fighter jets to the region as a deterrence to Iran and Iranian proxies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The clock is ticking for residents fleeing south through the battered streets of Gaza after the Israeli military told civilians to leave northern areas of the densely populated strip.
More than half of Gaza’s 2 million residents live in the northern section that Israel said should evacuate. Many families, some of whom were already internally displaced, are now crammed into an even smaller portion of the 140-square-mile territory.
Civilians packed into cars, taxis, pickup trucks and donkey-pulled carts. Roads were filled with snaking lines of vehicles strapped with suitcases and mattresses. Those without other options walked, carrying what they could.
“We will commence significant military operations only once we see that civilians have left the area,” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus told CNN early Sunday. “I cannot stress more than enough to say now is the time for Gazans to leave.”
Even as civilians fled southward, Israeli warplanes continued to blast Gaza over the weekend. Videos showed explosions and bodies along a Gaza evacuation route Friday, as tens of thousands of people abandoned their homes on the advice of the IDF.
Extensive destruction could be seen on Salah Al-Deen street – a main route for evacuation – in videos authenticated by CNN. A number of bodies, including those of children, can be seen on on a flat-bed trailer that appears to have been used to carry people away from Gaza City.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said 2,329 civilians have been killed and more than 9,000 injured since the conflict broke out a week ago, with 300 killed in the past 24 hours.
Casualties in Gaza over the past eight days have now surpassed the number of those killed during the 51-day Gaza-Israel conflict in 2014, according to the spokesperson for the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Richard Brennan, a World Health Organization official in Cairo, told CNN that 60 percent of those killed in Gaza the last week were women and children.
Several United Nations agencies have warned that mass evacuation under siege conditions will lead to disaster, and that the most vulnerable Gazans, including the sick, elderly, pregnant and disabled, will not be able to relocate at all. For days, Israel has cut off the Gaza population’s access to electricity, food and water.
“Despite Israeli announcements suggesting that there are safe areas for people trapped in the Gaza Strip, they are in fact exposed to bombardment throughout the entire territory, including in the south,” said Avril Benoit, executive director of Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
A growing number of nations, global rights groups and organizations are calling on Israel to respect international rules of war, urging the protection of civilians’ lives, and not to target hospitals, schools and clinics. Jordan’s foreign minister warned that Israel’s actions in Gaza are causing a humanitarian disaster and amount to mass punishment for more than 2 million Palestinians.
As food, clean drinking water and medical supplies in Gaza run out, there are urgent pleas for humanitarian aid to be allowed in. Footage showed aid convoys continuing to arrive into Egypt’s El-Arish stadium in preparation to enter Gaza through the Rafah land crossing. On the Gazan side, thousands of people are stuck at the crossing, with families telling CNN they have been unable to cross into Egypt.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told CNN Saturday that Egypt has tried to ship humanitarian aid to Gaza but has not received the proper authorization to do so.
Palestinians who fled south, and those who are still in the north, are rapidly running out of food and water. There is no more electricity, and those with fuel-powered generators will soon live in complete blackout. Internet access, through which residents communicate their plight to the world, is also shrinking.
MSF’s Benoit told CNN Saturday there is a serious water shortage in Gaza with many people beginning to suffer from severe dehydration.
“Everyone there feels like they are likely to be collateral damage,” Benoit said. “The health care system there has always been extra fragile and was considered (a) humanitarian chronic emergency for many, many years, and now it’s a complete catastrophe.”
Palestine Red Crescent Society spokesperson Nebal Farsakh told CNN the situation in Gaza is “devastating” and though they had been notified by Israel to evacuate Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City, they did not have the means to do so.
“We are not willing to evacuate because we do not have the means to evacuate our patients,” Farsakh said. “We have around 300 patients at the hospital. Some of them are in the intensive care unit. We have children in incubators. We can’t evacuate them.”
The World Health Organization said Saturday it “strongly condemns Israel’s repeated orders for the evacuation of 22 hospitals” in Gaza, calling it a “death sentence for the sick and injured.”
If patients are forced to move and are cut off from life-saving medical attention while being evacuated, they all face imminent deterioration of their condition or death, the WHO said in a statement.
Health facilities in northern Gaza continue to receive an influx of injured patients and are struggling to operate beyond capacity, with some patients “being treated in corridors and outdoors in surrounding streets due to a lack of hospital beds,” it added.
Israel, which has massed troops and military equipment at the border with Gaza, said its ramped up offensive will feature hundreds of thousands of reservists and encompass “a wide range of operational offensive plans.”
In addition to widespread airstrikes, Israel’s army is preparing troops for an “expanded arena of combat,” the IDF said in a statement on Saturday. The preparations have placed “an emphasis on significant ground operations.”
Hamas has shown a level of military capability far beyond what was previously thought, and a recent CNN investigation found it is probably well-prepared for the next phase of the war.
Texas woman has family stuck trying to evacuate Gaza
Complicating an Israeli offensive in Gaza are up to 150 hostages captured by Hamas – including soldiers, civilians, women, children and the elderly – and who are being held in the crowded enclave.
IDF spokesperson Conricus said it is a top priority to get hostages out of Gaza, despite the difficulty that a dense urban area adds to the fight.
Pointing to the “elaborate network of tunnels” that Hamas has, he said hostages “are most likely held underground in various locations.”
“Fighting will be slow. Advances will be slow, and we will be cautious,” he said.
As Israel battles Hamas, it also faces the threat of a wider conflict on new fronts.
Israel has said it is ready in case there are attacks from neighboring Lebanon or Syria.
Syria’s military reported late Saturday that an “air aggression” by Israel, originating from the Mediterranean Sea, damaged Aleppo International Airport and rendered it nonoperational.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Mission to the UN warned on Saturday that if Israel does not stop its attacks on Gaza, “the situation could spiral out of control and ricochet far-reaching consequences.”
The comments came as Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian met with Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Doha, Qatar on Saturday, according to Iran’s official news agency IRNA. The agency said it was the first official meeting between Iranian officials and Haniyeh since surprise Hamas attack on Israel that Hamas called Al-Aqsa storm.
Hostilities with neighboring Lebanon are being closely monitored internationally, as an escalation could draw the powerful Iran-backed Hezbollah paramilitary group into the conflict.
For days, Lebanon-based Palestinian militants have launched rockets into Israel, leading to Israeli attacks on Lebanese territory, including Hezbollah positions. Hezbollah has fired back at Israeli border positions with precision-guided missiles.
On Saturday, Israel returned fire after Hezbollah launched an attack on the disputed territory of the Shebaa farms near the Israel-Lebanon border, with CNN teams on the ground reporting prolonged shelling.
Mourners also gathered Saturday for the funeral of Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah in southern Lebanon after he was killed when Israel fired artillery into the area where he and other journalists were on Friday. The IDF said it was reviewing the circumstances surrounding the incident on the Lebanese border.
In response to the regional security situation, the Pentagon has ordered a second carrier strike group – the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower – to the eastern Mediterranean Sea, joining the strike group led by the USS Gerald R. Ford.
The US warships are not intended to join the fighting in Gaza or take part in Israel’s operations, but the presence of two of the Navy’s most powerful ships is designed to send a message of deterrence to Iran and Iranian proxies in the region.
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US sending second carrier strike group, fighter jets to region as Israel prepares to expand Gaza operations | CNN
Washington/Seoul
CNN
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The Pentagon has ordered a second carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean Sea, according to two US officials, and is sending Air Force fighter jets to the region as Israel prepares to expand its Gaza operations.
The US warships are not intended to join the fighting in Gaza or take part in Israel’s operations, but the presence of two of the Navy’s most powerful vessels is designed to send a message of deterrence to Iran and Iranian proxies in the region, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The first carrier strike group, led by the USS Gerald R. Ford, arrived off the coast of Israel last week.
Now the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower strike group, which deployed from Norfolk, Virginia, on Friday, is headed to the eastern Mediterranean. The aircraft carrier was initially set to sail for the waters of US European Command, but the officials said it will now head for the waters near Israel.
It is unclear at this point how long the Ford will stay in the region once the Eisenhower carrier strike group arrives, one official said.
The Eisenhower is the flagship of the carrier strike group, which will be joined by a guided-missile cruiser and two guided-missile destroyers, according to the Navy.
The Eisenhower can carry more than 60 aircraft, including F/A-18 fighter jets. The Ford can deploy more than 75 aircraft.
ABC News first reported the carrier strike group’s orders.
The Biden administration made clear that the carrier, and its accompanying force, are not there to engage in combat activities on behalf of Israel.
“There is no intention or plan to put American troops on the ground in Israel,” said John Kirby, strategic communications coordinator for the National Security Council, on Thursday. Kirby underscored that the purpose of the increased military presence in the region is to deter others from entering the conflict if they perceive weakness on the part of Israel.
“We take our national security interests very seriously in the region,” he said, noting that the purpose of the bolstered force posture was “to act as a deterrent for any other actor, including Hezbollah, that might think that widening this conflict is a good idea.”
In addition, the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a rapid reaction force capable of conducting special operations, is making preparations in case it is ordered closer to Israel to bolster the US’ force posture there, multiple US officials tell CNN.
The unit, which is on board the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan, is comprised of more than 2,000 Marines and sailors and would be capable of supporting a large-scale evacuation. Among the mission essential tasks for a Marine Expeditionary Unit are evacuation operations and humanitarian assistance.
No such order has been given yet to the unit, the officials said.
Meanwhile, US Air Forces Central on Saturday announced the deployment of F-15E fighter jets and A-10 ground-attack jets to the region.
The movement of the warplanes from the 494th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron and 354th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, respectively, “bolster the U.S. posture and enhance air operations throughout the Middle East,” an Air Force statement said. It did not give specific numbers of warplanes involved.
A US Central Command social media post said the A-10s will join another squadron of the aircraft already in the region.
“By posturing advanced fighters and integrating with joint and coalition forces, we are strengthening our partnerships and reinforcing security in the region,” Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, 9th Air Force commander, said in a statement.
Defense officials have said repeatedly in recent days that the Pentagon will be able to flow in additional forces and assets to the region quickly as needed, as Israel continues to fight a war against the terrorist group Hamas.
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DeSantis says US should not accept refugees from Gaza | CNN Politics
CNN
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday that the US should not accept refugees from Gaza, as tens of thousands flee their homes following an evacuation warning from Israel ahead of a possible ground assault.
“I don’t know what (President Joe) Biden’s gonna do, but we cannot accept people from Gaza into this country as refugees. I am not going to do that,” DeSantis, who is vying for the GOP presidential nomination, said at a campaign stop in Creston, Iowa.
“If you look at how they behave, not all of them are Hamas, but they are all antisemitic. None of them believe in Israel’s right to exist,” he continued.
DeSantis argued that Arab states should accept refugees from Gaza, who are attempting to cross south into Egypt, rather than refugees being “import(ed)” to the United States.
DeSantis’ characterization of Gaza residents is not supported by public polling on the issue. In a July poll by the pro-Israel organization the Washington Institute, 50% of Gazans agreed that “Hamas should stop calling for Israel’s destruction and instead accept a permanent two state solution based on the 1967 borders.”
One of DeSantis’s 2024 rivals, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, agreed with the Florida governor that the US should not accept refugees from Gaza but warned against making generalizations about them.
“It’s a danger any time that you categorize a group of people as being simply antisemitic, but I’ve said it also that we should not have refugees in here from Palestine. That’s not our role. It’s the role of those countries surrounding there,” Hutchinson told reporters in Nashua, New Hampshire, on Saturday.
In the wake of the surprise attack on Israel last weekend by the militant group Hamas, DeSantis and other Republican presidential hopefuls have voiced strong support for Israel. DeSantis and others have used the attack to argue for hardline immigration policies and stronger border security in the US.
On Thursday, DeSantis pushed back when confronted by a voter at a market in Littleton, New Hampshire, who questioned Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza.
The voter said that he doesn’t condone what Hamas did or the “killing of any innocent civilians,” but that “Israel is doing the exact same thing with Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a radical, right-wing crazy person,” referring to the country’s prime minister.
“And I see hundreds of Palestinian families that are dead, and they have nowhere to go because they can’t leave Gaza, because no one’s opening their borders,” the voter said.
DeSantis said the voter made a “really good point” by bringing up neighboring countries, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
“Why aren’t these Arab countries willing to absorb some of the Palestinian Arabs? They won’t do it,” DeSantis said.
The pair continued to have a back-and-forth about the conflict. Before walking out of the market, the voter said: “You had my vote, but you don’t now.”
DeSantis has also taken steps as governor of Florida to evacuate state residents from Israel. He told reporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday that he anticipated the first evacuation flight would land in Florida on Sunday. The governor’s press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, confirmed to CNN that the first flight will depart on Saturday and land in Florida on Sunday.
DeSantis has also seized on former President Donald Trump’s criticism of Netanyahu, slamming the GOP front-runner repeatedly in media appearances and on the campaign trail.
“He attacked Bibi after the country suffered the worst attack it’s had in its modern history. … And he did that because Bibi did not – Bibi congratulated Biden in November. That’s why he did it. He hates Netanyahu because of that. That’s about him. That’s not about the greater good of what Israel is trying to do or American security,” DeSantis said Friday in New Hampshire.
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Israeli army and settler attacks against Palestinians in West Bank increase
As Israel continues to pummel the Gaza Strip from the sky, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are gripped with tension and have reported an increase of attacks against them by settlers and soldiers alike.
Since last Saturday, at least 55 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,100 others wounded.
According to human rights activist Samir Abu Shams, the Israeli army is in violation of multiple international laws, particularly the Geneva Conventions, which stress that civilians should be unharmed in situations of war and armed conflict.
“What we are seeing today is that the occupation forces enter civilian areas, create friction, and target civilians with gunfire without any justification,” the 60-year-old from Tulkarem said. “Most of the cases of Israeli gunfire have been against Palestinian civilians passing through the street or going to their place of work.”
On the one hand, Abu Shams went on to say, the Israeli occupation isolates the Gaza Strip from the West Bank.
“On the other, it takes revenge on civilians in the occupied West Bank and takes measures to arm settlers and gives instructions to open fire on men, women, and children,” he said.
Israeli army shooting at Palestinian civilian cars
On Friday, Karem al-Jallad was driving home from Tulkarem’s vegetable market to his home in the southern district of the city at about 8:20pm (17:30 GMT). He was on the street near the Jewish settlement of Gishuri, which connects the west of Tulkarem to its south.
Israeli soldiers fired at his car and al-Jallad, thinking it was sound bombs, kept driving. But he was hit three times by live ammunition: in the chest, hand, and shoulder.
“There were five bullets on the front of Karem’s car,” his cousin Alaa al-Jallad said to Al Jazeera.
“Karem kept driving on the road until he reached the al-Safir roundabout, and from there he was transferred by ambulance to the local hospital,” he said.
Karem’s brother Ammar said he is undergoing a second operation.
“Yesterday evening, the doctors took out the bullet that hit him in the shoulder and settled in the neck,” Ammar said. “The second bullet caused a fracture and tear in the tendons, according to the doctors.”
Ahmed Zahran of the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Tulkarem told Al Jazeera that Israeli soldiers shot at four civilian cars in the same area on Friday, killing one Palestinian and injuring seven others. A second Palestinian, 16, was shot on Friday and died the next day from his injuries.
“We headed there in our ambulance and saw a white Hyundai car that was shot at,” Zahran said. “The four passengers were all injured, all in serious condition.”
His team transferred three of the wounded, and when they went back for the fourth Palestinian, the Israeli army targeted the medics and ambulance.
“We continued our work quickly, and at the same time we received a report of gunfire at another car about 30 metres (98 feet) away from us,” Zahran said. “After identifying it, we found no casualties, only an empty car in the middle of the street, with no one in it.”
They found Karem on the roundabout, and after transferring him to the hospital, they received another call that two other Palestinians were shot and injured while driving in their car as they passed by the settlement.
Settler attack
On Thursday evening, Randa Ajaj was in the car with her son Ismail and husband, who was driving back to Ramallah from the village of Yabrud.
“At one of the checkpoints, a Jewish settler opened fire in the air,” Ismail, 19, said. “We thought it was the soldiers so my father slowed down, but when we saw it was settlers with flashlights and guns, who tried to attack our car, my dad sped away.”
The settlers opened fire. The first bullet hit Ismail in the foot then landed in his mother’s body, where her kidney is.
Randa, a mother of seven, had a few years earlier donated one of her kidneys to her brother.
A second bullet penetrated Ismail’s shoulder, after shattering the back window.
Thinking Randa was just injured, the father continued driving and made it to a medical centre in the village of Silwad. From there, an ambulance took them to Ramallah Hospital.
“We thought she had fainted from fear because there were no traces of blood, but it turned out to be an explosive bullet that had penetrated my foot and landed in my mother,” Ismail said, his voice breaking. “We didn’t know that she had been killed.”
Ismail couldn’t continue the interview. He keeps watching videos of his mother’s funeral on his phone since he couldn’t attend, as he was in the hospital.
“She was loved by everyone,” her brother Abdullah said.
Danger on the roads for Palestinian drivers
Taxi drivers working on the Nablus-Ramallah line have also lessened their movements, citing checkpoint closures and an increase in settler attacks.
“There were 112 cars on the Nablus-Ramallah line before the war, and now there are only 25 cars driven by those from villages,” Nael Dweikat, a 51-year-old driver, said.
“Most of the entrances to the Palestinian villages on this route are closed with dirt barriers, as people generally do not go out in their cars because of the increased danger unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
Dweikat said that drivers have to take an alternative route to leave Nablus instead of the main road, which is 45 minutes longer.
“On Thursday, I was exposed to great danger during the funeral of the four Palestinians killed in the village of Qasra,” he said. “By chance, I was at the al-Sawiya village junction at the same time as the funeral procession.”
The settlers closed the road and attacked the procession, killing Ibrahim Al-Wadi and his son Ahmed. The road was completely closed for two hours.
“I feel afraid and my nerves are high while travelling because the roads are not safe and the settlers block and attack Palestinian cars with stones at many intersections within the West Bank,” Dweikat said. “Sometimes it takes some drivers five hours to get from one governorate to another.”
For Abu Shams, the human rights activist, this is all part of a calculated Israeli plan to pressure and cause a displacement of the Palestinian population whether in the occupied West Bank or the Gaza Strip.
“It is not a hidden agenda,” he said. “The Israel far-right ministers have announced more than once that they want a land without Palestinian residents, and they promised their voters, as part of their electoral campaigns, to implement that.”
“In short, they want to implement a third Nakba by spreading chaos and disrupting Palestinian institutions in more than one place, especially those that provide services to society.”
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Streets ‘reek of blood:’ Gazans run out of time after Israel’s evacuation deadline | CNN
CNN
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Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been fleeing south through the battered streets of Gaza after the Israeli military told them to leave northern areas of the densely populated strip.
Parts of the south are becoming even more crowded and overstretched, Gazans say, as waves of Palestinians abandon their homes in the wake of Israel’s statement, which came ahead of an anticipated ground assault by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
More than half of Gaza’s 2 million residents live in the northern section that Israel said should evacuate. Many families, some of whom were already internally displaced, are now crammed into an even smaller portion of the 140-square-mile territory.
The IDF said Saturday it would allow safe movement on specified streets between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. local time (3 – 9 a.m. ET). Residents were advised to use this window to move from the northern Beit Hanoun to Khan Yunis in the south – a roughly 20-mile distance of rubble-strewn streets.
The evacuation statement has been described by rights groups as well as some neighboring countries as a breach of international humanitarian law. Jordan’s foreign minister described it as a “war crime.”
The UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which was forced to move its central operations from Gaza City to a location in southern Gaza following the Israeli statement, on Saturday described the evacuation as an “exodus,” and said that “nearly 1 million people have been displaced in one week alone.”
The evacuation advisory came after Israel imposed a complete siege on Gaza in response to a brutal attack launched a week ago by Hamas, which left at least 1,300 dead in Israel.
At least 2,215 civilians, including 724 children and 458 women, have been killed in Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry, as the Israeli military continues to pound the territory.
Palestinians who fled south, and those who are still north, are rapidly running out of food and water. There is no more electricity, and those with fuel-powered generators will soon live in complete blackout. Internet access, through which residents communicate their plight to the world, is also shrinking.
Mohamed Hamed, a 36-year-old resident of Gaza City, moved southward to Nuseirat, a refugee camp some five kilometers north-east of Deir al-Balah – which he was told was safe.
Hamed fled the north with 30 family members, including his extended relatives, four children and his wife, who is over eight months pregnant.
“In this situation, we’re afraid that she goes into labor, and we wouldn’t know where to go,” he told CNN.
The family has no access to medical care and are crammed into a single apartment with no electricity, and quickly depleting food and water.
“There is no electricity, there is no water. Bakeries are working but these are their final hours, as the fuel they need is running out,” he said, adding that “the food we have may last us a day or two.”
Speaking to CNN by phone, Hamed said that Nuseirat is a small area yet has received large crowds of displaced Palestinians from the north. Drinking water is only available in mineral water bottles, he said, which are dwindling as crowds rush to stock up.
“Everything in supermarkets and shops was used up,” he said.
Shelling in Nuseirat is intense, but not as bad as it was in Gaza City, where neighborhoods were “entirely wiped out,” he said.
Hamed said that the time provided by the IDF for “safe passage” southward may not be enough for vast number of Palestinians that need to flee, and that some Gazans in the north refuse to leave fearing forceful displacement into Egypt.
For many, that would mean displacement for the second time. The majority of Gaza’s residents today are already refugees from areas that fell under Israeli control in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
“People are afraid of this, of being pushed to Egypt,” he said, adding that the airstrikes have been “horrifying,” with some areas being targeted for the first time despite the years of conflict between Hamas and Israel.
But not everyone in Gaza’s north has heeded the IDF’s call to move southwards. Palestinian journalist Hashem Al-Saudi and his family have only moved from east to west of Gaza City, which is among areas the IDF told civilians to evacuate.
Residents are forced to leave their homes to fill up water tanks, the 33-year-old told CNN by phone, which puts them at risk of being struck by Israeli missiles.
Food is scarce, he said, and may not last his 11-member family more than three or four days.
“I say this jokingly, but those who are on a diet are eating more than us.”
Al-Saudi says that not only do they have nowhere to stay if they moved south, but that the route itself is unsafe. “Even those who moved south were hit by airstrikes,” he told CNN.
“Nowhere is safe in the Gaza Strip, from Rafah (south) to Beit Hanoun in the north,” Al-Saudi said, adding that everywhere is targeted, including “homes, shelters hospitals and places of worship.”
“Everyone on this piece of land is targeted by the Israeli military, which from the start did not differentiate between civilian and soldier.”
CNN has geolocated and authenticated five videos from the scene of a large explosion Friday along a route for civilians south of Gaza City that Israel said the following day would be safe.
The videos show many dead bodies amid a scene of extensive destruction. Some of those bodies are on a flatbed trailer that appears to have been used to carry people away from Gaza City. They include at least several children. There are also many badly burned and damaged cars.
It’s unclear what caused the widespread devastation; the explosion occurred on Salah Al-Deen street on Friday afternoon. CNN has reached out to IDF for comment on any airstrikes in the same location.
“The situation is much worse than what you see on television,” he said. Many bodies remain unidentified, and corpses are being stored in refrigerators not made for storing human remains, Al-Saudi said.
“Streets are filled with rubble and reek of blood.”
The Israeli government launched a complete blockade on essential goods entering Gaza earlier this week, prompting warnings from human rights groups who say the siege is in violation of international law.
Israel, which administers most of the electricity, water, fuel and some of the food inside the Palestinian enclave, already imposes a stringent land, sea and air blockade, but used to permit some trade and humanitarian aid through two crossings that it controls.
Refaat Alareer, 44, a literature professor in Gaza City, said Thursday – before Israel told Gazans to evacuate – the shelves in his local supermarket are emptying every day. He has been able to buy cans of tinned tuna, adding that he avoided purchasing perishable goods because the lack of electricity means refrigerated food “will rot.”
Alareer, who lives with his wife and their six children, said his neighbors insist on leaving milk powder on the shelves – so that other parents can feed their own families.
“I’ve never seen people this disciplined,” he said. “I didn’t buy a single thing that is more expensive than it was last week.
“(What is) so beautiful about, you know, being in Gaza, being in Palestine, the solidarity.”
More than half of the residents in Gaza are food insecure and live under the poverty line, according to UNRWA. Alareer warned that blue collar workers, farmers and street vendors “will suffer the most,” from the blockade.
“We’re bracing for the worst. What happened is extremely genocidal in every sense of the word,” he added.
Aseel Mousa, a 25-year-old freelance journalist in Gaza, said she is unable to communicate with loved ones in other parts of the enclave, as electricity supplies diminish.
“We cannot connect with the world,” she told CNN on Thursday. “We hear the bombings, the air strikes and we don’t know where they are exactly.
“We cannot check up on our relatives who live in different areas of the Gaza Strip, we cannot reach them as there is no internet and there is no electricity.” She said on Friday that she relocated with her family from western Gaza to the south.
On Friday, Alareer told CNN he and his family see no choice but to remain in the north – despite Israel’s evacuation advisory – because they had “nowhere else to go.”
“Israel bombs (are) everywhere,” he said.
Gaza has already been under blockade since Hamas took control of the territory in 2007.
Egypt imposes a land blockade, while Israel imposes an air, sea and land blockade. The siege was completely tightened after Hamas’ attack on Israel a week ago, and the only remaining route into or outside of the Gaza Strip is the Rafah Crossing, which connects Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai.
While some aid has arrived in Egypt, it is yet to cross the border, which earlier this week was struck by Israel on the Palestinian side, according to Palestinian and Egyptian officials.
Egypt on Thursday stressed that its Rafah Crossing was however open, a claim CNN could not independently verify.
A Palestinian border official told CNN on Saturday morning that concrete slabs were being placed at the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, blocking all gates. The slabs were being placed by a winch visible on the Egyptian side of the crossing, the official said.
The official added that hundreds of Palestinians with foreign passports have been sat in the streets for hours, waiting to cross. “The gates are closed, and no one is being let through,” he told CNN.
CNN has reached out to Egyptian officials for comment.
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Deadly blast hits Gaza evacuation route after Israel issues deadline | CNN
CNN
—
A blast has struck a convoy on an evacuation route in Gaza, killing a number of people including several children, after a stark deadline ahead of a possible Israeli ground assault.
The IDF told civilians in and around Gaza City Friday that they must move south to avoid being caught up in Israeli military operations and announced a six-hour evacuation window on Saturday.
Israel has massed troops and military equipment at the border with Gaza, and continued bombarding the densely populated territory in response to the deadly October 7 attacks by the Islamist militant group, Hamas.
Videos authenticated by CNN showed a scene of extensive destruction following Friday’s blast on Salah Al-Deen street. A number of bodies, including those of children, can be seen on on a flat-bed trailer that appears to have been used to carry people away from Gaza City. There are also a number of badly burned and damaged cars.
It’s unclear what caused the widespread devastation. CNN has reached out to the IDF for comment on any airstrikes in the same location.
Even before the evacuation warning, more than 400,000 Palestinians had already been internally displaced by the past week of fighting as conditions worsen inside the bombarded strip.
But the evacuation statement and the prospect of a potential incursion have been sharply criticized by rights groups, including the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) head, who warned that such a move could bring “catastrophic humanitarian consequences.”
The IDF announced on Saturday it would allow people to move south “for their own safety” on specified streets of Gaza from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. local time, according to a statement shared by the IDF’s Arabic spokesperson Avishay Adraee on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The IDF claimed Hamas leaders had already taken measures to protect themselves from strikes in the area.
It is unclear how widely the messaging has been received on the ground given the current electricity and internet blackout.
When asked by CNN how this six-hour window has been communicated to citizens in Gaza, IDF spokesperson Maj. Doron Spielman said that “everybody in Gaza City now knows exactly what’s happening.”
“They’ve been notified in Arabic, in multiple languages on every available platform, both electronic and non-electronic platforms. Everyone in Gaza City knows that they need to go past Wadi Gaza.”
Spielman confirmed the IDF had dropped leaflets informing people in Gaza about the IDF’s announcement.
However, CNN has talked to a United Nations Relief and Works Agency school official, a paramedic and a journalist on the ground who were all unaware of this latest advisory on Saturday.
Palestinian-Americans have been waiting for the Rafah border crossing into Egypt to open Saturday, after the US State Department sent out guidance to families Friday telling them that it “may be open” Saturday afternoon.
“They told everybody to be here at 12, it’s been two hours almost, nobody showed up, nobody is here to open the gates.” Haneen Okal, a New Jersey resident, waiting with her three children, said.
“People are waiting at the Rafah crossing point but it’s not open and there is no clear direction from the embassy,” said Mai Abushaaban, a 22-year-old from Houston who is in contact with her family at the border.
CNN has reached out to the State Department and the US National Security Council for comment.
More than 2 million Palestinians – including over a million children – live in the 140-square-mile Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated places on Earth.
Images from Gaza have shown a mass rush toward the south of the coastal enclave beginning Friday. Civilians crammed into cars, taxis, pickup trucks and even donkey-pulled carts. Roads were filled with snaking lines of vehicles strapped with suitcases and mattresses.
Those without other options walked, carrying what they could. Some have stayed put regardless, telling CNN they felt nowhere was safe.
Since the evacuation order was issued Friday, Israeli military airstrikes have killed 70 evacuees and injured 200 more, Hamas’ media office told CNN.
Palestinian medical services and civil defense crews were targeted by an Israeli strike at the site of a rescue operation in northern Gaza on Saturday, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Interior and National Security.
“Occupation forces target civil defense crews and medical services while they were working to rescue martyrs and wounded from the house of the Dahman family in the northern Gaza Strip, early this morning, Saturday,” the ministry said in a statement.
Some healthcare facilities in the north of Gaza and Gaza City have said they will not be complying with Israel’s evacuation orders, as these “threats effectively act as a ‘death sentence’ for the thousands of injured and patients housed within these facilities.”
Saturday morning marked one week since Hamas’ unprecedented and bloody attack on Israel, which killed more than 1,300 people and led to the capture of civilian and military hostages now believed to be held in Gaza.
The surprise attack, widely described as Israel’s 9/11, saw waves of heavily armed Hamas fighters rampage through rural Israeli towns, kibbutzim and army bases.
In response, Israel ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza, including blocking food, water and fuel, while mounting its heaviest ever airstrikes on the enclave.
International observers warn the cutoff will see Gaza civilians die by starvation, disease and lack of medical care for the growing numbers of dying and wounded.
Hostilities spilled over between the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and IDF forces on Saturday in the disputed Shebaa farms, near the Israel-Lebanon border. Israel said it returned fire after Hezbollah launched an attack on the territory – a disputed strip of land between Lebanon and Syria adjoining the Golan Heights, under Israeli control.
The UN has described the situation in the Gaza Strip as a matter of “life and death,” warning that the clean water supply for the 2 million people there is running dangerously low. The UN also warned of increasing risks of waterborne diseases.
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) on Saturday called on Israel to not target its shelters in Gaza, warning that many people, including pregnant women and elderly or disabled people, will be unable to flee the area.
At least 2,215 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza from Israeli strikes, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said in an update Saturday. That toll includes 724 children.
An overwhelmed hospital in Gaza has resorted to using ice cream trucks from local factories as makeshift morgues to supplement the overflowing hospital mortuaries.
Dr. Yasser Khatab, a forensic pathologist in al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital, said in a video message sent to CNN on Saturday that the hospital in Deir al-Balah is unable to accommodate the increasing number of deceased.
UN officials were initially told by Israel on Thursday that the relocation of Gaza residents should happen within 24 hours. But Israel has since acknowledged that the mass migration order will take time, and IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said Friday that any deadline “may slip,” adding to the uncertainty swirling.
Another IDF spokesperson, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, claimed on Saturday that Hamas was trying to stop Palestinian civilians from evacuating “via messages and also checkpoints and stops on the ground,” citing media reports.
When asked by CNN whether the evacuation order suggested an impending ground incursion, Conricus said the IDF would “assess the situation on the ground” and “see how many civilians are left in the area … Once we see that the situation will be permissible for significant combat operations, then they will commence.”
The IDF also said Saturday that its fighter jets had struck operational headquarters used by Hamas militants, killing the head of the Hamas Aerial System in Gaza City, who the military claimed was “largely responsible for directing terrorists” during last week’s attack on Israel.
Israel’s evacuation deadline has raised international alarm and sharp criticism from some rights groups, especially as critical supplies run out and deaths rise in the isolated enclave, from which residents say they have no escape.
“The order to evacuate 1.1 million people from northern Gaza defies the rules of war and basic humanity,” wrote OCHA head Martin Griffiths in a statement late Friday. “Roads and homes (in Gaza) have been reduced to rubble. There is nowhere safe to go.”
The territory has been under a land, sea and air blockade enforced by Israel since 2007, with more than half its residents living below the poverty line even before the latest conflict. Now there’s only one corridor left for Palestinians to flee or for aid to enter, connecting Gaza to Egypt – and it’s not clear if that’s even operational.
Meanwhile, the World Food Programme said it distributed food to 135,000 people in shelters across Gaza on Friday, but warned “humanitarian supplies are running low.”
OCHA added that most people now have no access to water in the strip. “As a last resort, people are consuming brackish water from agricultural wells, triggering serious concerns about the spread of waterborne diseases,” it said.
In response, Israel’s ambassador to the UN said on Friday the government is doing “all that we can to minimize civilian casualties” by issuing the evacuation order, and accused the UN of not wanting Israel to “defend itself.”
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Austin and Blinken pledge fulsome support for Israel as concerns about expected ground offensive grow | CNN Politics
CNN
—
The Biden administration underlined its public and fulsome show of support for Israel Friday as two of its most senior national security officials visited the Middle East ahead of an expected Israeli ground incursion into Gaza.
Behind the scenes, however, the US faces a difficult diplomatic challenge – providing support for Israel’s “legitimate security operations” while trying to mitigate the devastating impact on civilians and prevent the war from expanding out to further fronts.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin arrived in Israel for meetings with senior leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He pledged unwavering US solidarity, echoing a message delivered by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Tel Aviv a day prior.
Blinken, meanwhile, is engaged in extensive shuttle diplomacy to press “countries to help prevent the conflict from spreading, and to use their leverage with Hamas to immediately and unconditionally release the hostages,” he said Thursday. Following his departure from Israel Thursday, Blinken traveled to Jordan to meet with King Abdullah II and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and then on to Doha for meetings with senior Qatari officials. He also briefly stopped in Bahrain before landing Saudi Arabia on Friday evening. He will also visit the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt before returning to the United States Sunday.
In public remarks, Blinken and Austin both offered full-throated support for Israel’s actions in the wake of the brutal Hamas attack last weekend, which killed 1,300 people, including 27 Americans. The subsequent Israeli air strikes on Gaza have killed nearly 1,800 people, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
“No county can tolerate having a terrorist group come in, slaughter its people in the most unconscionable way, and live like that. What Israel’s doing is not retaliation. What Israel is doing is defending the lives of its people and, as I said, trying to make sure that this cannot happen again,” Blinken said at a press conference in Doha Friday.
“This is no time for neutrality, or for false equivalence or for excuses for the inexcusable,” Austin said at another press conference in Tel Aviv Friday.
US administration officials have not publicly urged de-escalation or called for a ceasefire.
They have discussed “with Israel the importance of taking every possible precaution to avoid harming civilians,” Blinken said Friday – a discussion that comes as Israel’s actions are likely to face immense scrutiny from nations in the region, human rights groups, and progressive lawmakers in Washington. On Friday, the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter to President Joe Biden and Blinken urging them to call on the Israel Defense Forces to show restraint in Gaza. to show restraint in Gaza.
In remarks Friday, Biden said the US was working “urgently to address the humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, noting that “we can’t lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas.”
In his meetings in Tel Aviv Thursday, Blinken pressed Israeli officials on the need to establish safe zones for civilians inside Gaza, a senior State Department official said Friday.
“We do want to find some way to establish some sort of safe area where the people who live in Gaza City can go to be saved from Israel security operations,” the official explained. “It’s work that’s still coming together.”
“I can tell you from the meetings we had with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the security cabinet yesterday, it is something that they are actively focused on and actively working on,” they added.
The US is also working with Egypt and Israel to try to establish a humanitarian corridor for supplies to come into Gaza and for American citizens and other civilians to evacuate to Egypt.
The specter of imminent military action is looming, though, and it is unclear if the mechanisms can be set up in time. The Israeli military warned the 1.1 million people living in northern Gaza to evacuate their homes – an order that the United Nations decried as impossible to undertake “without devastating humanitarian consequences.”
Some Palestinian-Americans have received their first set of instructions that family members stuck in Gaza may be able to evacuate into Egypt on Saturday afternoon, according to emails shared with CNN. The US State Department’s Consular Affairs Crisis Management System told family members that on Saturday the Rafah Crossing “may be open.”
“We understand the security situation is difficult, but if you wish to depart Gaza you may want to take advantage of this opportunity,” the CACMS email said.
A State Department spokesperson told CNN they “are actively discussing this with our Israeli and Egyptian counterparts.”
“We support safe passage for civilians,” they said. “We are working with our Israeli and Egyptian partners to establish a safe humanitarian corridor both for Gazans trying to flee this war and to ensure humanitarian assistance reaches those in need within the territory.”
The US is scrambling to try to stop adversaries like Hezbollah and Iran – who have threatened to join the war – from doing so.
“A big part of my own conversations here throughout this trip, including today, following up the next couple of days, is working with other countries to make sure that they’re using their own contacts, their own influence, their own relationship to make that case – that no one else should be taking this moment to choose to create more trouble in some other place,” Blinken said.
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
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How To Deal With Guilt And Anxiety When Your Homeland Is Under Attack
For people who have family, friends or roots in Israel or the Gaza Strip but don’t live there themselves, it’s been almost impossible to grapple with the events of the past week while continuing to go about daily life.
The majority of casualties in the Israel-Hamas war thus far have been civilians. For people in the U.S. with loved ones or roots in the region, the worry, anxiety and guilt over being relatively safe in the States is more present than ever, said Nikita Fernandes, a therapist in New York City.
As an immigrant from India, Fernandes said she’s all too familiar with that combination of feelings whenever she reads upsetting news reports about her country.
“When tragedy strikes your homeland and you’re away from home, you are allowed to feel frightened, shocked and angry at the same time, and you can hold all of these emotions with compassion,” she told HuffPost. “You have to be gentle with yourself.”
Moments like this often tap into intergenerational trauma. Studies have shown that the trauma of strife in your homeland can effectively be passed down from one generation to the next, taking a toll on a person’s mental health and well-being.
“Through my own lived experiences and the lived experiences of my loved ones, I have learned that it’s OK and normal to feel a loss of control when we are away from our homeland in the face of tragedy,” Fernandes said.
Below, Fernandes and other mental health practitioners share advice on how to handle yourself with care if you belong to any of the affected diasporas.
Don’t tell yourself there’s a right or wrong way to feel right now.
Give yourself permission to experience every feeling you have to process right now, even if what you are feeling is confusing and you can’t make sense of it, said Sodah Minty, a psychologist and activist who was born in apartheid South Africa.
“When we are experiencing trauma, we cannot predict what we will feel or how we, or the world, will react,” Minty said. “Permission to accept uncertainty goes against our nature ― we are used to planning, anticipating, getting ahead, preventing uncertainty ― but we must accept a lack of control over what happens outside of our reach.”
Guilt, anxiety and grief mean that you care deeply, said Akua Boateng, a psychotherapist in private practice in South Philadelphia. Let these feelings be with you.
“This is your way to offer support from afar,” Boateng explained. “Acknowledge they are a part of your deep compassion for your home and family.”
“Weep, feel, light a candle in prayer, express your care to loved ones, and let your loving action be how you hold hope and honor for them in their time of need,” she said.
Jillian Doughty via Getty Images
Guilt, anxiety and grief mean that you care deeply, said Akua Boateng, a psychotherapist in private practice in South Philadelphia. If you have family in the affected regions, establish what facts you know.
Our bodies process internal conflict and extreme stress best in small bites. So take a moment to gather the facts about what is known about the state of your relatives and home, Boateng said.
“For example, the location of family members, points of contact on the ground and abroad, and safe zones you can refer to if you lose contact for some reason,” she said. “It can be helpful to form a collective of the family outside of the area to discuss updates and support each other.”
Find community where you are.
Nneka Osueke, a Black American therapist currently living in Thailand, knows how unsettling it can be when there’s conflict in your homeland and you’re far away.
“With all the wars, police shootings, and economic and political setbacks in the U.S., I absolutely have felt all kinds of emotions while living abroad,” she said.
Even in calmer times, Osueke said, she sometimes feels guilt about the relative ease of her life abroad, especially compared to the hustle of American life.
“At times, I’ve felt guilty for my life here,” she said. “It’s almost like I’d found a way out and didn’t take people with me. Then the grief and anxiety set in when I remember lots of people from different diaspora communities are tied to their lives in the U.S., or don’t feel they have the privilege to make the decision to leave.”
When there’s strife in the U.S. ― the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the spring of 2020, for instance ― Osueke leans heavily into her American community abroad.
“It’s important to find community where you are, so you can dialogue freely about the anger and grief you feel,” she said. “Maybe it’s others with similar backgrounds and allies who know how to properly hold space for you in these times.”
Minty, the psychologist, also emphasized the importance of community, whether you’re leaning into your family more or finding support online. (Maybe you find a private Facebook group for the diaspora, or a Reddit forum where people are sharing your same fears and validating your feelings.)
“Loneliness is often part of an international or immigrant identity anyway,” she explained. “Try not to be alone, even if you are with someone (or an animal or with nature) in silence. We are social beings and need the presence of others in times of uncertainty and grief.”
Cavan Images via Getty Images
Lean into community in these high-stress times, said psychologist Sodah Minty: “We are social beings and need the presence of others in times of uncertainty and grief.” Take care of your body.
During stressful times, most people leave their body to intellectually problem-solve. But your body is the best guide during extreme stress, Boateng said.
“Increase activities that provide recovery and reprieve to the nervous system,” she said. “Utilize breathwork, aromatherapy ― eucalyptus oil in a steam shower, for instance — sleep, take PTO, extra hugs and cuddles ― for the oxytocin support ― and talk it through with a therapist or friend.”
Channel feelings of anger and helplessness into advocacy.
Kept inside, anger can become emotional poison. Repressed anger can also spill over to your personal life, damaging those close to you in ways you didn’t intend, said Jennifer Chappell Marsh, a marriage and family therapist in San Diego.
“That’s why it’s best to acknowledge anger as it relates to injustice, and channel that emotion into doing something to help in some way, however small,” she said. “That could mean writing a letter to a government official, fundraising or engaging in humanitarian efforts. Whatever makes sense to you.”
Establish boundaries and be mindful of triggers.
Social media can offer a way to find out what’s happening ― sometimes, anyway ― but it’s easy to start doomscrolling when you’re feeling out of control. If you need to curtail your online reading right now or take a full social media break, don’t think twice about it, Fernandes said.
“It’s important to understand what triggers emotions of sadness, anger, guilt and hopelessness, and have boundaries in place about how often we use social media if we are being constantly triggered by news and people’s opinions,” she said.
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‘Nowhere safe to go’: Confusion, fear after Israel’s warning to evacuate
Twenty-one-year-old Mohammed Elewa has barely gotten any sleep this past week in the Gaza Strip.
The sound of Israeli bombs and Palestinian ambulance sirens is a constant background noise as Israel pounds the Strip in revenge for a surprise attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7.
On Friday morning, he woke up to the news that the Israeli military had issued evacuation orders for more than a million people in the northern Gaza Strip – nearly half of a total of 2.3 million residents.
The directive comes ahead of a feared ground invasion, but Elewa did not feel there was any point in leaving.
“There’s nowhere safe to go. Where am I supposed to go?” asks Elewa on the phone from his home.
He is one of many in Gaza City who say they have to stay because they cannot make their way to the south.
Palestinians flee their houses heading towards the southern part of Gaza Strip [Ahmed Zakot/Reuters] ‘There was no space’
In a press statement, the Hamas leadership called the Israeli order “psychological warfare”.
“The current developments in Gaza represent an extraordinarily audacious and brutal endeavour to forcibly remove the Palestinian people from their land,” said Izzat al-Risheq, a member of the Hamas political bureau.
Elewa ended up staying in Shujayea with some cousins and sisters, while others in his family went to the schools being used as shelters or to relatives in the south.
More than 270,000 displaced people have sought refuge in 88 schools run by UNRWA, the UN agency providing assistance to Palestinian refugees, in the northern Gaza Strip.
But the overcrowding was such that, in some cases, “there were already 50 people to a room”, the paracyclist, whose leg was amputated when he was injured in the Gaza border protests five years ago, said.
“I wanted to go with them [my family], but there was no space,” Elewa, said.
“[Now], they’re asking everyone to leave, but there’s literally nowhere to go. They’re just telling us to go stand in the street,” he adds, a mix of panic and anger in his voice.
A loud explosion sounds on the other end of the call and the phone connection is cut.
At least 1,300 people were killed in the attack on Israel, while at least 1,799 Palestinians including 583 children have been killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
More than 270,000 displaced people have sought refuge in 88 schools run by UNRWA [Ashraf Amra /Anadolu Agency] Death sentence for the vulnerable
The United Nations has called on Israel to rescind the evacuation order, saying the movement of people on that scale is “impossible” without dire humanitarian consequences.
Thousands of people were seen heading south on vehicles and on foot on Friday, clutching their children and meagre belongings.
But many cannot leave – like the many patients in Gaza’s overstretched hospitals.
“[It is impossible] to evacuate Al-Shifa hospital,” Dr Yusuf Abu al-Rish, Gaza’s deputy health minister, said in a message to reporters, referring to the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, which is stretched well over its 500-bed capacity.
“All the other hospitals are full of injured patients,” Abu al-Rish added.
“Most cases are not stable enough to be transported,” he said. “Even if there is a decision [to evacuate], it’s not applicable at all.”
Tarik Jasarevic, spokesperson for the World Health Organization in Geneva, said it would be impossible to evacuate vulnerable hospital patients and such a move would be a death sentence for many.
Riding a donkey-drawn cart, a family along with hundreds of other Palestinians carrying their belongings fled following the Israeli army’s warning to leave their homes and move south [Mahmud Hams/AFP] ‘No one can speak’
“I saw a lot of people earlier today escaping on trucks, donkeys, cars,” 33-year-old journalist Mohammed Abu Safia said from Gaza City. “I saw up to 10 people in one car.”
Abu Safia, who has already lost many members of his extended family in the past week, had come to Gaza City from Beit Lahiya in the far north of Gaza after the Israeli order.
He was sheltering in a church-run school with his young family of four.
“If you look at the people, you can see fear in their eyes, no one can speak,” said Abu Safia. “If I try to interview someone, they start arguing with me. No one can think straight.”
‘World leaders should speak up’
“I watched those videos [of people fleeing] today and I cried,” 36-year-old Wafaa al-Qudra told Al Jazeera.
“[Israel] knows we are in a state of war and there are no means of transport,” al-Qudra added, “Are they just trying to humiliate people?”
“This order does not alter Israel’s obligations in military operations to never target civilians and take all the measures it can to minimise harm to them,” said Clive Baldwin, senior legal adviser at Human Rights Watch.
“The roads are rubble, fuel is scarce, and the main hospital is in the evacuation zone,” he added. “World leaders should speak up now before it is too late.”
“The south is being bombed,” al-Qudra said, explaining why she decided to not try to evacuate. “My family lives there and they say the bombing didn’t stop for a minute.”
Meanwhile, Elewa, the paracyclist, gets back in touch with news he has survived the earlier bombing and is preparing for another frightening night under Israeli bombardment.
“There’s absolutely no sleep that’s happening at all,” he says. “Everyone’s just on edge, just waiting.”
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Dow Jones ekes out gain Friday, stocks mostly advance for the week as Israel-Gaza war escalates
U.S. stocks closed mostly lower Friday, but the Dow Jones and S&P 500 posted weekly gains, as the Israel-Gaza war appeared to escalate heading into the weekend. The Dow Jones Industries
DJIA,
+0.12%
rose about 39 points, or 0.1%, on Friday, ending near 33,670, according to preliminary FactSet data. The S&P 500 index
SPX,
-0.50%
fell 0.5% and the Nasdaq Composite Index
COMP,
-1.23%
closed 1.2% lower. The S&P 500’s energy segment outperformed Friday, gaining 2.3%, as U.S. benchmark crude surged nearly 6% after Israel ordered more than a million people in Gaza to evacuate to the south. Treasury yields fell, with the 10-year Treasury
TMUBMUSD10Y,
4.626%
rate retreating to 4.628% Friday, snapping a 5-week yield climb, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Bond prices and yields move in the opposite direction. Investors bought other haven assets too, including gold
GC00,
+0.23%
and the U.S. dollar
DXY,
+0.07% .
Wall Street’s “fear gauge”
VIX,
+15.76%
also touched its highest level in more than a week. Even so, the Dow Jones booked at 0.8% weekly gain, the S&P 500 advanced 0.5% and the Nasdaq fell 0.2%. -
Israeli President Says There Are No Innocent Civilians In Gaza
As Israel engages in a massive air campaign ahead of an anticipated full-scale ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Friday that all citizens of Gaza are responsible for the attack Hamas perpetrated in Israel last weekend that left over 1,200 people dead.
“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said at a press conference on Friday. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”
When a reporter asked Herzog to clarify whether he meant to say that since Gazans did not remove Hamas from power “that makes them, by implication, legitimate targets,” the Israeli president claimed, “No, I didn’t say that.”
But he then stated: “When you have a missile in your goddamn kitchen and you want to shoot it at me, am I allowed to defend myself?”
Herzog’s comments follow Israel’s announcement that it had directed the 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza to evacuate, likely ahead of a ground invasion. Israel dropped thousands of flyers over northern Gaza and left voice messages on Friday directing people to leave their homes and flee south.
Human rights groups and the United Nations denounced the evacuation order.
“The United Nations considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences,” Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general, said in a statement. “The United Nations strongly appeals for any such order, if confirmed, to be rescinded avoiding what could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.”
“Ordering a million people in Gaza to evacuate, when there’s no safe place to go, is not an effective warning,” Clive Baldwin, senior legal advisor to Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “World leaders should speak up now before it is too late, he added.
Fabrizio Carboni, the Near and Middle East regional director for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in a statement that both the collective punishment of civilians by Israel and taking of hostages by Hamas are violations of international humanitarian law.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog (right) said “an entire nation out there that is responsible” for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken (left)met with Herzog on Oct. 12. JACQUELYN MARTIN via Getty Images
“We are now in contact with Hamas and Israeli officials as part of efforts on this issue,” Carboni said in a statement. “As a neutral intermediary we stand ready to conduct humanitarian visits; facilitate communication between hostages and family members; and to facilitate any eventual release.”
In addition, a small handful of Democratic Party politicians denounced both Israel’s order to evacuate northern Gaza and Herzog’s statement of support for collective punishment.
“The mass expulsion of over 1 million people in a day is ethnic cleansing,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said on social media.
“I get [Herzog] wanting to go after Hamas,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said on social media. “But international standards must apply, protection of innocents must be respected, and unrealistic demands like moving 1.1 million people in 24 hours is ridiculous. Israel will lose public support & hurt innocent people.”
The Biden administration has refused any effort to criticize Israeli military actions, including denouncing calls for de-escalation as “repugnant.”
The Israeli Defense Forces said on Thursday that it has already dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, an area twice the size of Washington, D.C., with a population of 2.2 million, half of whom are children. The bombing campaign has killed more than 1,500 people, including 500 children, and wounded more than 6,000 people so far, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
Israel also cut off all access to electricity and water in Gaza. The sole power plant in Gaza ran out of fuel on Oct. 11, leaving hospitals to run on backup generators.
So far, more than 400,000 Palestinians have been displaced inside Gaza, according to the UN. But there is nowhere to go. The only border crossing to Egypt is closed. Israel has bombed it repeatedly since the beginning of the war and Egypt refuses to admit refugees.
Herzog’s comments in support of collective punishment follow a string of dehumanizing statements from Israeli leaders following the massacre of civilians by Hamas.
“We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Oct. 9, two days after the attack.
“Human animals must be treated as such,” IDF Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian said on Oct. 10. “There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
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In Gaza, Palestinians have no safe place from Israel’s bombs | CNN
CNN
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When Hamas fires rockets at Israel, advanced warning detectors set off alarms in targeted neighborhoods, civilians flee to an extensive network of bomb shelters, and the vaunted Iron Dome system works to intercept projectiles in the air.
But in Gaza, none of those high-tech defenses were available to protect Maisara Baroud, 47, when his apartment building was hit by Israeli airstrikes Monday night. The only thing that saved him and his family: A neighbor yelling from the street.
The neighbor received a call from Israeli military, giving him a heads up that a strike at a nearby residential building was imminent. Still, the neighbor told Baroud and the 15 other family members living in Baroud’s building – including nine children – to get out.
The first strike wrecked most of the six buildings on the block, including Baroud’s.
“My building was no longer livable – it was a skeleton of a house left,” he added. “The doors were destroyed, the building’s exterior walls were all gone, the windows shattered.”
Still, Baroud and others assumed the worst was over and headed back into the building to salvage their belongings. Minutes later, the neighbor received a follow-up call from the Israeli military that a follow-up bombing was coming, and the families fled again.
A second strike destroyed Baroud’s home, reducing his building and his art studio to rubble.
This is the reality for Palestinians living in Gaza without the protection of a robust civil defense infrastructure. With no air raid sirens or bomb shelters, the more than 2 million Palestinians living in the besieged territory – half of whom are children – rely on rare phone calls or text messages from the Israeli military to alert them of imminent strikes.
“In Gaza, we don’t have anything…you have nowhere to go, no bomb shelters, no refuge, you are in the street,” Baroud said. “If you’re lucky enough to even get an alert to tell you to get out of the house, you leave saying, ‘Thank God.’”
The lack of protection serves as a stark contrast to the civil defense systems of Israel, which has faced intense barrages of rocket fire from Hamas in recent days. Israel boasts elaborate and technologically advanced capabilities – ranging from early radar detection to the Iron Dome – meant to protect its civilians in the event of an attack.
In Gaza, the call or text alerts are far from guaranteed and – at most – give residents a few minutes to evacuate. Often, it’s just a guessing game.
The lack of civil defense has also affected international humanitarian and medical workers, who are faced with sporadic, momentary notice of Israel’s counterattacks.
A post from Doctors Without Borders on Tuesday noted how some of its team members in Gaza receive a text message in the middle of the night telling them to evacuate their homes.
“You have to wake up your children in the middle of the night and leave your house, without taking any of your belongings,” the post said.
Dr. Barbara Zind, a US-based pediatrician in Gaza on a medical mission, was speaking to CNN Tuesday about being stranded in the area when her interview was interrupted by loud bombings outside her hotel. Asked if she could seek safe shelter, she responded: “There are no bomb shelters here.”
Warning phone calls from the Israelis also are more likely to be missed in Gaza because of rolling blackouts. The territory’s only power station ran out of fuel Wednesday and stopped working, this after Israel ordered a “complete siege” and cut off access to food, fuel, water and electricity.
Israel, however, has invested heavily over the years in its civil defense systems to protect civilians from rockets and mortars fired by Hamas and other militant groups in the region. Its elaborate and technologically advanced capabilities are meant to protect its people and minimize harm in the event of a rocket attack.
Azriel Bermant, senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague, says Israel is “very strong and well-organized” on the civil defense front.
“It’s about saving lives, it’s about strengthening morale, it’s about reducing pressure on the government to send in ground forces,” Bermant said. “If the government knows that the public is protected, especially in a war situation, they feel the public will support the government in what it does.”
Crucially, the Israeli Defense Forces has developed early warning systems that sound sirens whenever rockets are fired towards Israel. These warning systems are able to calculate the location where a rocket is projected to land and set off a siren in the targeted area, often giving residents advance notice to find shelter.
Civil defense capabilities are also built into the infrastructure of Israel. Israeli law requires all homes, residential buildings, and industrial building to have bomb shelters. These shelters prove crucial to protect Israelis when warning sirens go off – providing the public with safe and fortified locations to hide from incoming rockets.
Israel also possesses key active defense measures. The most notable is called the Iron Dome System. Deployed in 2011, the Iron Dome is designed to shoot down incoming projectiles. It is equipped with a radar that detects rockets and then uses a command-and-control system that quickly calculates whether an incoming projectile poses a threat or is likely to hit an unpopulated area. If the rocket does pose a threat, the Iron Dome fires missiles from the ground to destroy it in the air.
Bermant said when it comes to missile defense, “there’s no question it saves lives,” and that it also can act as a deterrent.
The system isn’t foolproof, however, and when the volume of rockets fired by Hamas comes in intense barrages, it decides which pose the greatest threat to urban areas and infrastructure and targets those. Some rockets get through.
Additionally, Israel has several public awareness campaigns that are intended to educate the public on best practices in response to air raid sirens – such as where to go, how much time one has to find cover, and what to do if there is no readily available safe site.
With far less resources, Gaza hasn’t built anything comparable to the Israeli defense systems. While Hamas has constructed a network of underground tunnels for its fighters, it hasn’t invested in civilian shelters or warning networks.
Gaza has been cut off from the rest of the world by an Israeli blockade of Gaza’s land, air and sea dating back to 2007, with tight restrictions on the movement of goods. It has been described by Human Rights Watch as the “world’s largest open-air prison.”
“The disparity is primarily because of the blockade, which has really undermined Gaza’s infrastructure,” said Tareq Baconi, board president of the Palestinian policy network Al-Shabaka. “All entry of goods, all the resources that might be used to build that kind of a system are curtailed.”
The lack of defenses has left civilians like Baroud living in fear. As he examines the ruins of his building, he said he’s left wondering why his home was hit.
“I keep asking myself why? … There’s no point in asking why.”
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‘A message’: Why is Biden dispatching a US strike group during Gaza war?
Washington, DC – As the war rages on in Gaza, the United States has moved one of the largest aircraft carriers in the world and an accompanying strike group to the Eastern Mediterranean, bringing its military might to the tense region.
US officials have framed the move as aimed at deterring Hezbollah and Iran from “taking advantage” of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
But with that stance, analysts say President Joe Biden is effectively threatening to enter the war on Israel’s side should a broader conflict break out. Still, many believe it is highly unlikely that the US military would directly take part in the hostilities.
“The administration judged it to be important to take a step that would make it as clear as possible to Hezbollah and Iran that there is the danger of US military intervention on behalf of Israel,” said Steven Simon, a senior research analyst at the Quincy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
“I’m pretty sure that President Biden does not want to get involved in this war. But sometimes you have to do these things to buttress deterrence,” added Simon, who previously served in senior positions on the White House National Security Council and in the State Department.
Biden said this week that his administration had enhanced its “force posture in the region to strengthen our deterrence” as a warning to any country or organisation considering an attack on Israel.
Days earlier, when the US announced it would send the USS Gerald R Ford Carrier Strike Group to the region, a defence official put Washington’s position more bluntly.
“These posture increases were intended to serve as an unequivocal demonstration in deed and not only in words of US support for Israel’s defence and serve as a deterrent signal to Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah and any other proxy across the region who might be considering exploiting the current situation to escalate conflict,” the official said.
“Those adversaries should think twice.”
USS Ford a ‘political and strategic’ signal
The status quo in the region was upended on Saturday when the Palestinian group Hamas launched a highly coordinated attack against Israel from the besieged Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of people and taking dozens captive.
Israel has responded by placing Gaza under a total blockade, preventing fuel and water from entering the strip. It has also bombed the territory relentlessly, as the Israeli military appears to prepare for a ground invasion.
Paul Salem, president of the nonprofit Middle East Institute, said the scale and brutality of Hamas’s attacks facilitated a “much clearer American response” in support of Israel than in previous Gaza conflicts.
“Having the aircraft carrier there is major political and strategic signalling,” Salem told Al Jazeera.
But he added that a US military intervention would be “far-fetched”.
“Definitely they’re signalling to Hezbollah and Iran: ‘Do not get involved. If you do get involved, you might have to deal with us,’” Salem said.
“It’s not clear what that would mean. And keeping in mind that Biden is entering an election year, it’s not great for him to enter a war in the Middle East. So he has political constraints as well.”
“The arrival of these highly capable forces to the region is a strong signal of deterrence should any actor hostile to Israel consider trying to take advantage of this situation,” said General Michael “Erik” Kurilla, commander, U.S. Central Command.https://t.co/URHNRuPdvn pic.twitter.com/fQhjW8UAVt
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) October 10, 2023
On Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated US commitment to Israel’s security during a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“You may be strong enough on your own to defend yourself. But as long as America exists, you will never ever have to. We will always be there by your side,” Blinken told Netanyahu.
Israel, which has been accused by major rights groups like Amnesty International of imposing a system of apartheid on Palestinians, already receives $3.8bn in US aid annually.
The Quincy Institute’s Simon explained that while Israeli forces are capable of fighting on several fronts, the potential for US attacks against Hezbollah would help Israel in a possible war.
He noted that the USS Ford carries 90 combat aircraft that could keep up “serious operational tempo”, including intercepting communications.
“If the United States says to Israel, ‘We’ll pick up a little bit of a burden against Hezbollah, so you can continue to focus on Hamas,’ then I think the Israelis would be very happy,” Simon told Al Jazeera.
The Lebanese front
Experts say it likely will not come to that. Since the war broke out, there have been skirmishes between Hezbollah and Israel, but they have stayed contained in the Lebanese-Israeli border area.
Salem, the president of the Middle East Institute, said Hezbollah is trying to draw some of Israel’s military focus from Gaza to the Lebanese border without igniting a full-on conflict.
“They’re playing that game of making it hot enough to get Israel’s attention and to force them to pay attention to the northern front in order to weaken the forces in the south, but not so much that it immediately triggers a war in Lebanon, on Lebanon,” he said.
Still, Salem added that the calculus of Hezbollah and its Iranian backers may change depending on the trajectory of the war in Gaza.
“If there’s a huge Israeli retaliation, yes, it’s going to kill a lot of people. But if it doesn’t defeat Hamas and if it [the conflict] ends in a few weeks, then Hezbollah wouldn’t need to open a second front,” he told Al Jazeera.
“But if Israel does ‘really well’ and is careening through Gaza and is about to completely knock out Hamas, I think there will be a lot of pressure strategically from Iran and others. They don’t want to lose Hamas as an asset, so they might have to act.”
For his part, Imad Harb, director of research at the nonprofit Arab Center Washington DC, said Lebanon’s internal financial and political crises also cap the chances of a war with Israel.
The country’s economy has been in free fall since late 2019, with its currency losing more than 90 percent of its value. A political deadlock has also prevented the election of a new president since Michel Aoun’s term expired nearly one year ago.
“Lebanon cannot take another war. Hezbollah’s constituency cannot take a war, and neither are the Arab states ready to assist Lebanon if Lebanon gets in a war with Israel and in the process gets destroyed,” Harb told Al Jazeera.
Hezbollah’s response
Hezbollah has dismissed the arrival of the US military to waters not far from Lebanon’s shore.
“Sending aircraft carriers to the region to boost the morale of the enemy [Israel] and its frustrated soldiers shows the weakness of the Zionist military machine despite the massacres and crimes it is committing and therefore its need for constant outside support,” the Lebanese group said in a statement.
“Thus, we stress that this move will not scare the people of our nation and the resistance groups that are ready for confrontation until total victory.”
Harb said Hezbollah’s response is unsurprising, and it doesn’t mean the group is rushing to war. “This is all rhetoric. I mean, these guys — the Israelis, Hezbollah, the Iranians, the Americans — all of them are rhetoricians,” he said.
Harb added that the US is not eager to go to war either. While Biden wants to be seen as standing with Israel, Harb explained that Americans have grown weary of war, and a battle with Hezbollah and Iran could quickly spiral out of control.
“This is why a message like this is only a message,” Harb said of the US military move. “Maybe Biden is just simply trying to take a stand, but I really don’t see the United States getting really involved in a war of this nature.”
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‘Complete paralysis:’ Palestinian medics say disaster awaits Gaza as Israel pounds enclave with airstrikes | CNN
CNN
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Medical and relief workers are pleading for safe passage for the 2 million civilians in Gaza as Israel pounds the enclave with airstrikes and imposes a complete siege, in response to the brutal attack launched by the militant group Hamas.
Time is running out for the residents crammed into the increasingly battered 140-square-mile territory under Israeli and Egyptian blockades, as supplies of food and water run low. Families are desperately searching for shelter as missiles flatten buildings and towers. Medical supplies are in dire shortage. And most of the enclave has already lost power, after the fuel that generates electricity ran out on Wednesday.
At least 1,417 Palestinians, including 447 children and 248 women, have so far been killed in Gaza, and 6,268 others injured, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
In Israel, at 1,200 people have been killed, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said on Wednesday. Israel also said that up to 150 hostages, including civilians, have been taken to Gaza by Hamas – which controls the strip.
Relief groups are calling for the protection of the many civilians in Gaza who continue to bear the brunt of the bloody war between Hamas and Israel, urging that an emergency corridor be established for the transfer of humanitarian aid.
Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz on Thursday said Israel would deprive the strip of electricity, water and fuel until Hamas returns the hostages.
“No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened, and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home,” Katz wrote on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. “And no one will preach us morals,” he added.
Responding to a question about whether Israel is upholding the laws of warfare with its siege on Gaza, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Thursday his country “abides by international law, operates by international law.”
“Every operation is secured and covered and reviewed legally with all due respect,” Herzog told CNN’s Becky Anderson at a press briefing in Jerusalem, adding that talk about war crimes is “totally out of context.”
Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, the co-founder of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS), warned the complete siege of Gaza will pollute water and reduce oxygen supplies, depleting health indicators, including infant and maternal mortality rates, poverty, starvation and the spread of waterborne diseases and gastrointestinal infections.
“You will have a very big rise of maternal mortality of women who are going to give birth under terrible conditions. We will see epidemics starting to spread in Gaza,” he said. “That’s also besides the number of people who will be killed by Israeli air strikes.
“We are heading towards a complete paralysis of the medical system there.”
Human Rights Watch earlier this week criticized Israel’s call for the complete siege as a form of “collective punishment” and a “war crime.”
The Israeli blockade on Gaza has crippled the health system inside the Palestinian enclave, medical workers told CNN, as emergency teams struggle to triage patients amid dwindling medical supplies.
Barghouti, the PMRS co-founder, said patients with pre-existing health conditions, including cancer and chronic kidney failure, are at risk of death because the siege has blocked access to fresh drugs.
The PMRS has 180 doctors, nurses and psychotherapists stationed inside Gaza, alongside thousands of volunteers, he told CNN on Wednesday.
“I receive calls around the clock from our people there [in Gaza], patients with kidney problems who need kidney dialysis, telling me that they could die in a few days,” said Barghouti, who is also the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative, a political party headquartered in the occupied West Bank.
“Our medical teams are finding great difficulty moving from one place to another because, as people will say, there is no safe place at all. So it’s a disaster in front of our eyes.”
A British-Palestinian surgeon working in Gaza, Ghassan Abu-Sitta, said that unless a humanitarian corridor replenishes the system, hospitals may not make it to the end of the week.
“Unless there is a cessation of the bombing and the humanitarian corridor (opens), the Palestinian health system will not survive beyond the week,” Abu-Sitta, who was working inside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City but is now operating from a hospital in northern Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, told CNN.
The doctor is yet to see any aid come through.
Hospitals all over Gaza are overwhelmed with patients, he said, adding that power is limited to generators and already scarce drinking water is being transported in tanks. Concerns of diseases spreading, including cholera, are growing, Abu-Sitta added.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) warned on Thursday that Gaza likely only has enough fuel for a few more hours.
“I wanted to say we are going toward a catastrophe, but we are already in the catastrophe,” ICRC’s regional director for the Middle East told reporters during a briefing in Geneva, adding that the humanitarian situation will soon become “unmanageable.”
Gaza’s health infrastructure is close to a breaking point, Dr. Ashraf Al-Qudra, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, said Thursday. All beds are occupied, and there is no room for new patients in critical condition, Al-Qudra said.
Earlier Thursday the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said hospitals in Gaza “risk turning into morgues” amid power cuts.
The Palestinian Minister of Health Mai Al Kaila on Thursday called for urgent international help to field hospitals in Gaza. Medical supplies, emergency departments and intensive care units are urgently needed, she said.
With the current Israeli siege, the only corridor through which Palestinians or aid can pass in and out of Gaza is the Rafah Crossing, which connects Gaza to Egypt.
Egypt on Thursday denied reports of the crossing being closed, saying it has however sustained damage due to repeated Israeli airstrikes on the Palestinian side of the border.
Palestinian officials in Gaza had said two days earlier that the crossing had been closed due to Israeli airstrikes. CNN could not independently verify whether the crossing is open or closed.
In a statement, Egypt called on international partners to send humanitarian and relief aid to Palestinians in Gaza, adding that Egyptian authorities will be receiving aid packages at the Al-Arish International Airport in north Sinai.
A Jordanian plane carrying medical aid for Gaza left for Egypt on Thursday, according to a statement from the Jordanian Hashemite Charitable Organization, a state-run relief agency, adding that the supplies will be delivered to medical authorities in Gaza through the Rafah border crossing.
It is unclear how the aid will cross the border amid airstrikes on Gaza.
CNN has reached out to the Egyptian government about the status of Rafah crossing, whether aid will be able to pass through, and whether Palestinians fleeing the conflict will be able to cross into Egyptian territory.
The US said it is in talks with Israel and Egypt about creating a humanitarian corridor through which civilians can cross.
“We’re talking to Israel about that. We’re talking to Egypt about that (getting civilians out of Gaza),” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday prior to departing for Israel.
A senior Israeli official told CNN on Wednesday talks are “underway” to allow US citizens and Palestinian civilians in Gaza to cross over into Egypt ahead of any possible land invasion of the territory by Israeli forces.
The official with knowledge of the negotiations told CNN’s Matthew Chance on Wednesday that under the proposal being discussed, all American citizens would be permitted to pass through the Rafah border crossing if they present their US passports, while the movement of other Palestinian civilians would be limited to 2,000 people a day.
Final approval of the arrangement would need to come from the Egyptians, who control the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, but the Israeli official said it was “in Israel’s interests” for as many Palestinians as possible to leave Gaza.
The IDF on Wednesday said it has amassed some 300,000 reservists near the Gaza border.
“They (Hamas) will regret this moment – Gaza will never return to what it was,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said earlier.
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How does Hamas get its weapons? A mix of improvisation, resourcefulness and a key overseas benefactor | CNN
CNN
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The brutal rampage by Islamist militant group Hamas on Israel last weekend involved thousands of rockets and missiles, drones dropping explosives, and untold numbers of small arms and ammunition.
But the attack was launched from the Hamas-ruled enclave of Gaza, a 140-square-mile (360-square-kilometer) strip of Mediterranean coastal land bordered on two sides by Israel and one by Egypt.
It’s a poor, densely populated area, with few resources.
And it has been almost completely cut off from the rest of the world for nearly 17 years, when Hamas seized control, prompting Israel and Egypt to impose a strict siege on the territory, which is ongoing.
Israel also maintains an air and naval blockade on Gaza as well as a vast array of surveillance.
Which begs the question: How did Hamas amass the sheer amount of weaponry that enabled the group to pull off coordinated attacks that have left more than 1,200 people dead in Israel and thousands more injured – while continuing to rain rocket fire down on Israel?
The answer, according to experts, is through a combination of guile, improvisation, tenacity and an important overseas benefactor.
“Hamas acquires its weapons through smuggling or local construction and receives some military support from Iran,” the CIA’s World Factbook says.
While the Israeli and US governments have yet to find any direct role by Iran in last weekend’s raids, experts say the Islamic Republic has long been Hamas’ main military supporter, smuggling weapons into the enclave through clandestine cross-border tunnels or boats that have escaped the Mediterranean blockade.
“Hamas’ tunnel infrastructure is still massive despite Israel and Egypt regularly degrading it,” said Bilal Saab, senior fellow and director of the Defense and Security Program at the Middle East Institute (MEI) in Washington.
“Hamas has received arms from Iran smuggled into the (Gaza) Strip via tunnels. This often included longer-range systems,” said Daniel Byman, a senior fellow with the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
“Iran has also been shipping Hamas its more advanced … ballistic missiles via sea, in components for construction in Gaza,” said Charles Lister, senior fellow at the MEI.
Retired general explains why he thinks Iran helped support Hamas attacks
But Iran has been a mentor, too, analysts say.
“Iran also helped Hamas with its indigenous manufacturing, enabling Hamas to create its own arsenals,” said Byman at the CSIS.
A senior Hamas official based in Lebanon gave details of the Hamas’ weapons manufacturing in an edited interview with Russia Today’s Arabic-news channel RTArabic published on their website on Sunday.
“We have local factories for everything, for rockets with ranges of 250 km, for 160 km, 80km, and 10 km. We have factories for mortars and their shells. … We have factories for Kalashnikovs (rifles) and their bullets. We’re manufacturing the bullets with permission from the Russians. We’re building it in Gaza,” Ali Baraka, head of Hamas National Relations Abroad, is quoted as saying.
For bigger items, the MEI’s Lister said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the Iranian military that answers directly to the country’s supreme leader, has been giving Hamas engineers weapons training for almost two decades.
“Years of having access to more advanced systems has given Hamas engineers the knowledge necessary to significantly enhance its domestic production capacity,” Lister said.
And Tehran keeps the training of Hamas’ weapons makers current, he added.
“Hamas’ rocket and missile engineers are part of Iran’s regional network, so frequent training and exchange in Iran itself is part and parcel of Iran’s efforts to professionalize its proxy forces across the region,” Lister said.
But how Hamas sources the raw materials for those indigenous weapons also shows the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the group.
Gaza has none of the heavy industry that would support weapons production in most of the world. According to the CIA Factbook, its main industries are textiles, food processing and furniture.
But among its main exports are scrap iron, which can provide material to make weapons in the tunnel network below the enclave.
And that metal in many instances comes from previous destructive fighting in Gaza, according to Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who wrote about it for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Fikra Forum in 2021.
When Gaza infrastructure has been destroyed in Israeli airstrikes, what’s left – sheet metal and metal pipes, rebar, electrical wiring – has found its way into Hamas’ weapon workshops, emerging as rocket tubes or other explosive devices, he wrote.
Recycling unexploded Israel munitions for their explosive material and other parts adds to Hamas’ supply chain, Alkhatib wrote.
“The IDF’s operation indirectly provided Hamas with materials that are otherwise strictly monitored or forbidden altogether in Gaza,” he wrote.
Drone video shows Israel pounding Gaza
Of course, all of that didn’t happen overnight.
To fire as many munitions as it did on Saturday in such a short period means Hamas must have been building up its arsenal, both by smuggling and manufacturing, over the long haul, said Aaron Pilkington, a US Air Force analyst on Middle East affairs and PhD candidate at the University of Denver.
Baraka, the Hamas official in Lebanon, said the militant group had been preparing last weekend’s attack for two years.
He made no mention of any outside involvement in the planning of the attack, saying in the Russian media report only that the allies of Hamas “support us with weapons and money. First and foremost, it is Iran that gives us money and weapons.”
The analysts also say the size and scope of Hamas’ raids on Israel caught them – as well as Israeli and other countries intelligence services – off guard.
“It is important to remember that firing off a bunch of rockets is actually very uncomplicated,” Pilkington said.
“What is surprising, … is how you could set stockpile, move, set up, and fire thousands of rockets all while eluding Israeli, Egyptian, Saudi intelligence, etc. It is difficult to see how Palestinian militants could have done this without … Iranian guidance.”
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Today in Gaza, I no longer believe we will get out of this alive
REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK
Early this morning, a blast blew in the windows, and I shielded my baby with my body and realised: No place is safe.
Gaza City – As I write this, I no longer believe we will get out of this alive.
On Wednesday, I woke from my sporadic sleep to the sound of the bombardment that has continued nonstop for the past four nights. Each day we wake up in a different house. But each day the sounds and smells we wake to are the same.
Our home was badly damaged on the first night of the bombardment. So we moved to my parents’ home. Then on Tuesday, a missile strike that destroyed a home just one building away left my parents’ home uninhabitable. So we came to the home of my in-laws. Now, there are 40 of us here. It feels as though the missiles are following us – getting closer with each strike – and we are running out of places to run to.
I prayed fajr, the pre-sunrise prayer, and then lay down beside my two-month-old son as he slept. I couldn’t smell his skin, his hair through the stench of gunpowder, smoke and dust that seems to permanently fill the air.
It was just a few minutes later that the windows blew in, covering us with shards of glass. I instinctively covered his tiny body with my own. Then, I grabbed him and ran, all the while crying out for my eight-year-old daughter.
“Banias! Where is Banias?” I pleaded as everyone ran, all of us calling out for our children, our parents amid the mayhem. When I found her, she was crying and shaking. My husband and I took turns hugging her to comfort her as best we could, knowing that there was so little comfort to be found.
The shattered glass and a cut from an early morning explosion on October 11, 2023 [Maram Humaid/Al Jazeera] Still shaken, we ran downstairs to the ground floor, so we could leave if needed, but then, the bombardment appeared to stop. Outside, the air attacks had levelled yet another home, just metres from where we were. It was hit without prior warning. Oftentimes, a small strike is followed by a larger one. Thankfully, the people who lived there were not inside when it struck.
When we were still at my parents’ home, we had similarly run downstairs amid the shouts and cries of neighbours warning one another to take cover after a strike hit a nearby building. The moments waiting for the second, bigger strike to hit were unbearable. I held my baby tightly and turned his face towards my chest as though I could shield him from the dust and the fumes from the explosives.
Hours passed. Then on Tuesday evening, a big missile hit, flattening the building. Our screams filled the air amid the sound of shattering glass and objects. About 10 minutes later after the dust had settled, we saw my parents’ front door and windows had been destroyed and the furniture was covered in debris. We quickly packed our belongings and left.
I thought my parents’ home would be safe. I thought my in-law’s place would be safe.
But where do we go next? There is not a home in Gaza that is safe.
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Alarm as Israel again hits Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt
The third attack on the crossing’s Palestinian side in the last 24 hours consisted of ‘four missiles’, reports say.
Gaza’s sole border crossing with Egypt, the only entry point not controlled by Israel, has been hit again by an Israeli air raid, reports say.
The third attack on the Rafah crossing in 24 hours consisted of “four missiles” that targeted the Palestinian side of the crossing, local Egyptian group Sinai for Human Rights said on Tuesday.
Witnesses had said the second attack hit the no-man’s land between the Egyptian and Palestinian gates, damaging the hall on the Palestinian side. The Israel military said it could “neither confirm or deny” any attack on the crossing “at this point”, the AFP news agency reported.
NGO Sinai for Human Rights said Tuesday’s attacks prompted the closure of the crossing, but there was no immediate confirmation from either side.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Israeli military revised a recommendation by one of its spokespeople that Palestinians fleeing its air raids in Gaza head to Egypt.
Rafah is the sole possible crossing point into Sinai for Gaza’s 2.3 million residents. The rest of the 40km-long (25-mile-long) strip of land is surrounded by Israel and the sea. The passage of people and goods is strictly controlled under a blockade of Gaza enforced by Egypt and Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel’s assault on Gaza has reportedly caused alarm in Egypt, which has urged Israel to provide safe passage for civilians from the besieged enclave rather than encouraging them to flee southwest towards Sinai, two Egyptian security sources told the Reuters news agency on Tuesday.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on Tuesday said the escalation in Gaza was “highly dangerous” and that Egypt was pushing with regional and international partners for a negotiated solution to the violence.
Egypt would not allow the issue to be settled at the expense of others, el-Sisi said in comments reported by state news agency MENA, an apparent reference to the risk that Palestinians could be pushed into Sinai.
Egypt, the first Arab country to normalise relations with Israel, has mediated between Israel and Palestinian factions during previous conflicts in Gaza and has pressed to prevent further escalation in the current fighting.
Israel has been pounding Gaza with the fiercest attacks in the 75-year history of its conflict with the Palestinians, after Hamas launched a deadly and unprecedented incursion into Israel on Saturday.
On Monday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “total blockade” of Gaza, cutting access to water, food, fuel and electricity. Such a siege of Gaza by the Israeli army, with the intent to starve a population, is a war crime under United Nations statutes.
“What it seems to me is that the measures taken, including the bombing of the Rafah crossing, hints to an intention to really starve and kill the people who are innocent inside the Gaza Strip,” UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese told Al Jazeera, adding that Palestinians in Gaza are concerned that they could experience something akin to a “second Nakba” in the days ahead.
Gaza’s health ministry on Tuesday said at least 830 people, including women and children, have been killed and more than 4,250 wounded since Saturday. At least 900 Israelis have also been killed since the unprecedented attack by Hamas.
The siege of Gaza has also raised fears that Palestinian civilians could find themselves facing an enormous onslaught, or even an Israeli ground invasion, with nowhere to flee.
Gaza’s Hamas-run interior ministry said Israeli bombardments on Monday and Tuesday hit an entry gate on the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing. The crossing was also closed from the Egyptian side and Palestinians planning to travel to Gaza retreated to north Sinai’s main city of Al Arish, Egyptian sources said.
The latest attack on Rafah follows a similar incident on Monday that partially disrupted operations at the border, though Egyptian security sources said access for registered travellers and humanitarian activity had been restored by Tuesday morning.
On Monday, about 800 people left Gaza through the Rafah crossing and about 500 people entered, though the crossing was closed for the movement of goods, according to the United Nations humanitarian office.
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Here’s the real reason the stock market is so horrid. And, yes, it’s rather spooky.
Some say it’s the fear of stagflation.
Some say it’s chaos on Capitol Hill.
Some say it’s turmoil in the Middle East.
But we all know the real reason the stock market is so crummy, right?
It’s October! Of course stocks are down!
It is a bizarre, inexplicable, and yet undeniable, fact that, throughout history, Wall Street has produced almost all of its gains during the winter months of the year — from Nov. 1 to April 30. It is an even more bizarre, inexplicable and yet undeniable fact that the rest of the world’s stock markets have done the same thing.
The so-called summer months, meaning the half of the year from May 1 to Halloween, have generally given you bupkis or worse.
Around the world, over the course of centuries of recorded financial history, stock-market returns have averaged four full percentage points higher from November to April than from May to October, report researchers Ben Jacobsen at Tilburg University and Cherry Yi Zhang at Nottingham University’s Business School in China. This so-called Halloween Effect seems “remarkably robust,” they concluded, after studying the financial returns of 114 different countries going back as far as they could find reliable monthly data — starting with the stock market in 1693 London.
Even more extreme: In the 65 countries for which they had extensive data both about the stock market and about short-term interest rates, it’s fair to say you would have been better off selling your stocks on May 1, putting the money in the bank, then taking it out again at the end of October and buying back your stocks (ignoring fees and taxes, of course).
“In none of the 65 countries for which we have total returns and short-term interest rates available — with the exception of Mauritius — can we reject a Sell in May effect based on our new test. Only for Mauritius do we find evidence of significantly positive excess returns during summer.”
Italics mine. Mauritius?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA
is now lower than it was at the end of April. So is the Russell 2000
RUT
index of small-cap U.S. stocks. The benchmark international stock index, the MSCI EAFE, is down about 6%. Japan’s Nikkei
NIY00,
+1.90%
is slightly up, as the yen has tanked.The S&P 500
SPX
is hanging on to a small gain, but that is only because of the early summer gains of a few tech titans. The average S&P stock is down about 2.5% since the end of April — while an investment in no-risk Treasury bills is up more than 2%.Meanwhile, let the record show that, over the same period, according to the record keepers at MSCI, the stock market in Mauritius is up 12%.
Booyah!
Every time I write about this Halloween or “sell in May” effect, I make the same two points, and I make no apologies for repeating them here, because they are unavoidable.
The first is that, every spring, after looking at this data, I am tempted to sell all my stocks at the end of April, and every year I don’t, because I think it’s absolutely ridiculous. (And someone on Wall Street who is much smarter than me usually persuades me not to.) And most years I end up kicking myself for not doing it.
The second is to recall the old economists’ joke: “I don’t care if it works in practice! Does it work in theory?” Selling in May — or, sure, the Halloween Effect — has absolutely no reason that anyone can find for working in theory. But apparently, it works in practice — which is pretty much where we are now.
Does this mean stocks are going to rally? It’s anyone’s guess. It would be crazy if it were that simple. But, then, the whole Halloween Effect is crazy.
If history is any guide, now is the time to buy stocks, not sell them, because the next six months are likely to be the time when they make you money. And if history isn’t any guide, well, aren’t we all sunk anyway?
