Gaza ‘fast becoming unlivable’ as fighting rages
- Israel’s deadly air raids in central and northern Gaza continue with ground fighting reported in southern part of the Strip.
- The 65-year-old father of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif is killed in an Israeli air strike on their family home in northern Gaza.
Gaza’s al-Fukhari is dangerously overcrowded as Israel pushes people south
The people of Gaza keep moving south because they are told by the Israeli army to do so, leaving areas they either lived in or were already displaced to, heading for so-called “safe zones” that the Israeli army has bombed anyway.
In al-Fukhari, south of Rafah, what those displaced Palestinians found was anything but shelter.
“We went looking for another place and didn’t find anything other than al-Fukhari. We were among hundreds of people, there was no room in the European Hospital or the schools. The schools can’t take any more people,” Rula Musmah told Al Jazeera.
She and her family have already been displaced four times since the start of the war, and this time, they and countless others have ended up on the street.
Hezbollah announces another attack on Israeli forces
The armed group in Lebanon says it targeted Israeli soldiers in the Shtula area in northern Israel.
Israeli troops were attacked with the “appropriate weapons, achieving direct hits”, Hezbollah said in a statement.
The incident is the latest in the daily, escalating violence between the two sides. Hezbollah has described its military operations against Israel over the past two months as a push to support Palestinians in Gaza.
EU will sanction ‘extremist’ settlers: Official
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, says that sanctions will be imposed on Israelis who have committed acts of violence in the occupied West Bank.
“We will work on proposing sanctions on extremist settlers in the West Bank,” he said during a news conference.
Attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have been on the rise since the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Several countries, including Germany and France, are mulling over a similar move, and the US last week announced visa bans on settlers known to be engaging in violence against Palestinians.
Hamas says its fighters targeted Israeli soldiers, engaging in ‘fierce clashes’
The group’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, says its fighters targeted “crowds” of Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis with mortar shells.
The troops were stationed inside a “field command headquarters”, east of Khan Younis.
Earlier, the group said that its fighters were able to target Israeli “special forces” who had stationed themselves in a building in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahiya and that several of them were “killed and wounded”.
The group also said its fighters were engaging in “fierce clashes” with Israeli ground troops, west of Jabalia in Gaza’s north.
Hezbollah-Israel clashes ‘contained but could get out of hand’: Analyst
Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, says the clashes between Hezbollah and Israel are “contained but could get out of hand” due to possible miscalculations.
Bishara noted that there are voices in Israel calling for attacking Hezbollah after the war in Gaza to push the Iran-allied group off the Israeli border in the north.
Hezbollah fighters and Israeli forces have been trading fire since the start of the conflict in October. But so far, the violence has not escalated to an all-out war.
The Biden administration had sent aircraft carriers and military assets to the region, saying that it is aiming to deter other actors from entering the war.
“If, for the Israelis, the day after Gaza is Lebanon, and there are some in Israel that would like to carry out a preemptive strike against Hezbollah deep inside Lebanon, then I think Lebanon also would want to start thinking about its own preemptive strike in that case so that it could damage Israel as much as possible,” Bishara said.
UN official: ‘Gaza is becoming unviable’
What started early in the war as a humanitarian crisis, Juliette Touma tells Al Jazeera, has now evolved into a “humanitarian catastrophe”.
The director of communications for the UN’s Palestinian relief agency says UNRWA is currently sheltering nine times as many people in Gaza as it planned for.
“Now 1.3 million people are in overcrowded UNRWA shelters that are themselves unprotected,” she said, adding disease and hunger are spreading in its facilities.
“People don’t have enough food. They are getting hungry. Many of them are getting very understandably frustrated,” she continued.
Touma said the UN agency has seen break-ins at its aid warehouses in Gaza, and its aid trucks have been stopped on the street.
“People literally started taking food from those trucks and eating it then and there,” she said. “That shows if the war continues, Gaza is going to sink further into the abyss.”
Her organisation and many others say only a ceasefire can begin to improve the situation in Gaza, but “quite often our calls have gone unheeded”.
Gantz: Israel must remove threat from Hezbollah in Lebanon
The comments came from the member of Israel’s war cabinet in a social media post after he spoke with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“I expressed to the Secretary that heightened aggression and increased attacks by Iranian-backed Hezbollah on Israel demand of Israel to remove such [a] threat from the civilian population of northern Israel,” Gantz, who also leads one of Israel’s main opposition parties but joined an emergency unity government after the onset of the war in October, said.
Israel has increasingly threatened Lebanon with an expansion of its current attacks, possibly targeting Beirut.
Gantz added that he expressed his appreciation to Blinken for the US’s support at the UN Security Council, and in particular, for its veto last week that prevented a resolution backing a ceasefire from passing.
Hezbollah announces another attack on Israeli forces
The armed group in Lebanon says it targeted Israeli soldiers in the Shtula area in northern Israel.
Israeli troops were attacked with the “appropriate weapons, achieving direct hits”, Hezbollah said in a statement.
The incident is the latest in the daily, escalating violence between the two sides. Hezbollah has described its military operations against Israel over the past two months as a push to support Palestinians in Gaza.
