GAZA STRIP: Gaza’s civil defense agency said a series of Israeli air strikes on Thursday killed at least 58 people, including 12 guards securing aid trucks, while the military said it targeted militants planning to hijack the vehicles.
The latest bloodshed came despite growing optimism that negotiations for a ceasefire and hostage release deal might finally succeed, with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan saying on Thursday that the regional “context” had changed in favor of an agreement.
Seven guards were killed in a strike in Rafah, in southern Gaza, while another attack left five guards dead in nearby Khan Yunis, agency spokesman Mahmud Basal said.
“The (Israeli) occupation once again targeted those securing the aid trucks,” Basal told AFP, though the military said it “does not strike humanitarian aid trucks.”
Basal added that around 30 people, most of them children, were wounded in the two strikes.
“The trucks carrying flour were on their way to UNRWA warehouses,” Basal noted, referring to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.
Witnesses later told AFP that residents looted flour from the trucks after the strikes.
The military said its forces “conducted precise strikes” overnight on armed Hamas militants present in an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone in southern Gaza.
“All of the terrorists that were eliminated were members of Hamas and planned to violently hijack humanitarian aid trucks and transfer them to Hamas in support of continuing terrorist activity,” a military statement said.
The United Nations and aid agencies have repeatedly warned about the acute humanitarian crisis in the besieged Gaza Strip, exacerbated by the war that has persisted for more than 14 months.
“Conditions for people across the Gaza Strip are appalling and apocalyptic,” UNRWA spokeswoman Louise Wateridge told journalists during a visit to Nuseirat in central Gaza.
She added that life-saving aid to “besieged areas in north Gaza governorate has been largely blocked” since the Israeli military launched a sweeping assault there in early October.
In southern Gaza, UNRWA said earlier this week it had successfully delivered enough food aid for 200,000 people.
But on Thursday it said “a serious incident” meant that only one truck out of a convoy of 70 traveling along Gaza’s southern border reached its destination.
The agency did not provide any details on the incident, but called on “all parties to ensure safe, unimpeded and uninterrupted” aid deliveries.
As diplomacy aimed at ending the war appeared to be gaining pace again, the violence continued.
The civil defense agency said Israeli air strikes on two homes, near Nuseirat refugee camp — which was again hit later in the evening — and Gaza City killed 21 people.
Fifteen people, at least six of them children, died “as a result of an Israeli bombing” of a building sheltering displaced people near Nuseirat, Bassal said.
Bassam Al-Habash, a relative of the dead in Nuseirat said: “These people are innocent, they are not wanted. They have nothing to do with the war.”
“They are civilians, and this is not a war between two armies, but a war armed with weapons, planes and Western support against a defenseless people who own nothing.”
Another strike late on Thursday killed at least 25 people and wounded 50 others in the Nuseirat refugee camp, the civil defense said.
In the latest diplomatic effort to secure an end to the violence, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on Wednesday calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.
The non-binding resolution was rejected by the United States, Israel’s main military backer.
However, in recent days, there have been indications that previously stalled ceasefire negotiations could be revived.
Families of the 96 hostages still in Gaza since the Hamas attack that triggered the war, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead, are pressing for their release.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who visited Israel on Thursday and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said he “got the sense” that the Israeli leader was “ready to do a deal.”
He also said that the Hamas approach to negotiations had changed, attributing it to the overthrow of their ally Bashar Assad in Syria and the ceasefire that went into effect in the war between Israel and another ally, Lebanese group Hezbollah.
Militants abducted 251 hostages during the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which killed 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
This count includes hostages who died or were killed while held in Gaza.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 44,805 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.
Gaza rescuers say Israeli strikes kill 58, hit flour trucks
https://arab.news/8zygx
Gaza rescuers say Israeli strikes kill 58, hit flour trucks
- Around 30 people, most of them children, were wounded in the two strikes
Syria’s leader set to visit Berlin with deportations in focus
- Sharaa is scheduled to meet his counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president’s office said
BERLIN: Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa is expected in Berlin on Tuesday for talks, as German officials seek to step up deportations of Syrians, despite unease about continued instability in their homeland.
Sharaa is scheduled to meet his counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president’s office said.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s office has yet to announce whether he would also hold talks with Sharaa during the visit.
Since ousting Syria’s longtime leader Bashar Assad in late 2024, Sharaa has made frequent overseas trips as the former Islamist rebel chief undergoes a rapid reinvention.
He has made official visits to the United States and France, and a series of international sanctions on Syria have been lifted.
The focus of next week’s visit for the German government will be on stepping up repatriations of Syrians, a priority for Merz’s conservative-led coalition since Assad was toppled.
Roughly one million Syrians fled to Germany in recent years, many of them arriving in 2015-16 to escape the civil war.
In November Merz, who fears being outflanked by the far-right AfD party on immigration, insisted there was “no longer any reason” for Syrians who fled the war to seek asylum in Germany.
“For those who refuse to return to their country, we can of course expel them,” he said.
- ‘Dramatic situation’ -
In December, Germany carried out its first deportation of a Syrian since the civil war erupted in 2011, flying a man convicted of crimes to Damascus.
But rights groups have criticized such efforts, citing continued instability in Syria and evidence of rights abuses.
Violence between the government and minority groups has repeatedly flared in multi-confessional Syria since Sharaa came to power, including recent clashes between the army and Kurdish forces.
Several NGOs, including those representing the Kurdish and Alawite Syrian communities in Germany, have urged Berlin to axe Sharaa’s planned visit, labelling it “totally unacceptable.”
“The situation in Syria is dramatic. Civilians are being persecuted solely on the basis of their ethnic or religious affiliation,” they said in a joint statement.
“It is incomprehensible to us and legally and morally unacceptable that the German government knowingly intends to receive a person suspected of being responsible for these acts at the chancellery.”
The Kurdish Community of Germany, among the signatories of that statement, also filed a complaint with German prosecutors in November, accusing Sharaa of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.
There have also been voices urging caution within government.
On a trip to Damascus in October, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said that the potential for Syrians to return was “very limited” since the war had destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure.
But his comments triggered a backlash from his own conservative Christian Democratic Union party.
