Hamas is willing to release up to 70 women and minor hostages in exchange for a five-day ceasefire, an offer that Israel has not yet responded to but is unlikely to accept. Monday's proposal came the same day that the Israeli army closed the siege around the Al Shifa hospital and northern Gaza was left with only one operational health center. The largest hospital complex on the strip no longer admits patients and claims that they attack anyone who wants to leave it. Its staff hopes that Israel will guarantee an evacuation that does not come, although Tel Aviv said it is providing incubators for the transfer of the nearly 40 premature babies who have been out of their machines for more than three days due to the lack of electricity.
"We have told the (Qatar) mediators that in a five-day truce we can free 50 of them and the number could reach 70 due to the difficulty of the captives being held by different factions," said the UN spokesman. al Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, Abu Ubaida, while admitting that Israel had requested the release of 100 captives.
Israel, which effectively blockades Gaza, has rejected a ceasefire, arguing that Hamas would simply use it to regroup, but has allowed brief humanitarian "pauses" to allow food and other supplies to come in and foreigners to flee. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that Washington "would like to see considerably longer pauses - days, not hours - in the context of hostage releases."
According to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Israel and Hamas are close to reaching an agreement to release most of the kidnapped Israeli women and children, a senior Israeli official is quoted as saying. In exchange, Israel will simultaneously release Palestinian women and youth held in its prisons. The deal could be announced within days if the details are worked out.
Hamas's offer coincided with the publication of a video released by the Islamist group in which it displayed the lifeless body of Noa Marciano, a 19-year-old soldier kidnapped on October 7, and denounced that her death was due to Israeli bombings. on the strip. Israel confirmed her death on Tuesday and held Hamas responsible for her death.
Israeli forces shelled southern Gaza on Tuesday after Israeli tanks advanced to the gates of Al Shifa hospital, where Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf Al Qidra, who is inside the hospital, said on Monday that 32 patients had died in the last three days, including newborns, due to lack of power and heavy fighting. At least 650 patients remain inside along with between 200 and 500 health workers, and 1,500 are sheltering there, reported the UN humanitarian agency (OCHA).
Furthermore, inside the hospital there are dozens of bodies that have not been able to be taken to the morgue, whose cold chambers no longer have electricity. "It's almost a cemetery," denounced WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier. At least "179 bodies" were buried this Tuesday in a mass grave, hospital director Mohammed Abu Salmiya told France Presse. Among them were seven premature babies who died due to lack of electricity, he said.
A Doctors Without Borders (MSF) surgeon who works at the hospital asked yesterday afternoon that Israel guarantee them a safe corridor to evacuate the hospital: "Because we have seen how they have killed some people who were trying to leave Al Shifa," he explained. , while telling how a sniper is attacking the patients. "When we sent the ambulance to bring the patients, it had barely advanced a few meters and they attacked it," he explained to the NGO.
Israel, for its part, announced the coordination of an operation to transfer patients with incubators provided by an Israeli hospital to Gaza, along with an image of a soldier unloading the machines from a van. The Gaza health authorities have not commented on the matter.
In his first comments since the reported patient deaths in Al Shifa, US President Joe Biden said on Monday that hospitals must be protected. "My hope and expectation is that there will be fewer intrusive actions regarding hospitals and that we will continue to be in contact with the Israelis." Regarding the negotiations for the release of hostages, he commented that "there is an effort to achieve this pause to address the release of hostages and that is also being negotiated with the Qataris... committed," he added. "So I have some hope, but the hospitals have to be protected."
However, Israel has the feeling that despite international pressure it can still carry out its destructive operations in the strip, which have caused more than 11,000 deaths, more than 4,000 minors, at least until Christmas.
According to Israel, both the Al Shifa hospital and other health centers in the north of the enclave are used by Hamas fighters to hide their tunnels. Tel Aviv says that beneath Al Shifa there is a headquarters of the Islamist group, which it accuses of using patients and medical staff as human shields. Hamas denies this.
To prove these claims, the Israeli army has been providing evidence for days: confessions of alleged prisoners, telephone conversations between alleged Hamas members, graphic simulations of the tunnel network, etc. And, last night, he provided several images of the Rantisi children's hospital, after taking control of the health center that a few days ago was still housing several patients and medical staff, also in the north. In the basement of the hospital the army said it had found weapons and what it described as rooms for holding hostages, according to its main spokesman, Daniel Hagari.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army continues to bombard the south of the strip, despite the fact that it is supposedly the safe area to which Israel sends evacuees. More than one and a half million displaced people, more than two-thirds of Gaza's population, are seeking refuge in the southern half of the strip but conditions are very precarious. At least 13 people were killed when Israeli forces attacked their homes in the town of Khan Younis, Gaza Health Ministry officials said.
UN-run shelters in the south are severely overcrowded, with an average of one bathroom for 160 people. People queue for hours to get scarce bread and brackish water. Garbage piles up, sewage floods the streets and taps run dry because there is no fuel for water pumps or treatment plants. The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, which is struggling to provide basic services to more than 600,000 people sheltered in schools and other facilities in the south, said it could run out of fuel on Wednesday.
Six Palestinians died early Tuesday morning in an Israeli raid in the city of Tulkarem, in the north of the occupied West Bank, which in 2023 is experiencing its most violent year since the Second Intifada with more than 400 deaths in violent circumstances with Israel. Of these, 193 dead and more than 2,700 injured since October 7. Israel has also detained more than 1,560 Palestinians in the West Bank since the war began, 940 of them allegedly linked to Hamas, they allege.
The raid, which the Israeli Army has not reported, also left 12 injured, four of them seriously, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which also reported that Israeli troops hindered the transfer of an injured girl on Monday night. from Tulkarm to Nablus at the Enab checkpoint. "They prevented the Tulkarem hospital ambulance from completing its journey, and forced the girl and her mother to get out of the ambulance and into a civilian vehicle," the ministry said.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that an armored Israeli military bulldozer entered the Tulkarem refugee camp and "destroyed its infrastructure, while occupation forces broke into several houses, climbed onto their roofs and fired live bullets at everything that moved." ". Images published on social networks show how the machine left some streets in Tulkarem inoperative.
This is the second Israeli raid on Tulkarem in a week, following one in which four Palestinians were killed in a raid to arrest suspected Hamas members and another in the first weeks of the war in which 13 Palestinians were killed. several of them in a drone airstrike.
