The Palestinians of the West Bank are hooked on Al Jazeera to continue the war and yesterday, in Ramallah, they looked with hope at the signs that a ceasefire agreement will be reached in the next few hours. The truce would last five days and, in exchange, Hamas would release an unknown number of hostages. However, last night there was still no official confirmation in this regard.
“We are closer than we have been in quite some time, perhaps closer to closing this agreement than we have been since the beginning of this process,” said US Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer yesterday. , which added that the release of hostages could include Israel releasing an also undetermined number of Palestinian prisoners, as demanded by Hamas. “We are talking about suspending the fighting for a few days so that we can get the hostages out,” said Israel's ambassador to the US, Michael Herzog.
Rumors of an imminent ceasefire – which Russia and Iran also requested yesterday – soared after US President Joe Biden spoke by phone on Friday with Tamim bin Hamad al Thani, emir of Qatar, the country that acts as an intermediary. between Israel and Hamas, whose leaders live in Doha.
Western powers continue to pressure Netanyahu to stop bombing Gaza. Yesterday it was the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who told the premier by phone that there have already been “too many civilian casualties.” Netanyahu is also facing increasing pressure from the relatives of the hostages, a delegation of whom he will receive in Jerusalem today.
For his part, the head of EU diplomacy, Josep Borrell, recalled that the resolution approved last week by the UN Security Council to establish pauses and humanitarian corridors "is binding and must be implemented." As if the United Nations did not accumulate a long list of resolutions approved and unfulfilled.
While the ceasefire does not come, the Israeli slaughter continues and does not discriminate between terrorists and civilians, including humanitarian workers. Doctors Without Borders denounced that the army had “deliberately” attacked one of its convoys when it was trying to evacuate 137 people to the south of the strip, an attack in which one of them died. In addition, seven journalists or media personnel yesterday joined the blacklist of 40 news workers killed by the Israeli offensive, according to the Palestinian Union of Journalists.
And once again, the Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres, was “shocked” yesterday, this time by the dozens of deaths caused by the bombings on Saturday in two schools run by the United Nations.
Regarding the situation at the Al Shifa hospital in Gaza City, the army announced yesterday that it had found a tunnel 55 meters long and 10 meters deep under the largest health center in the strip. Israel released a video with images of the tunnel, supposedly from Hamas, a week after taking control of the place.
Meanwhile, in Ramallah, a large banner hangs in Al Manara Square. Its design, with dozens of images of faces – most of them children – is reminiscent of the collage of photos of the 240 kidnapped by Hamas that can be seen throughout Israel. But no, the faces on the poster located in the center of the West Bank capital correspond to a handful of the nearly 13,000 Palestinians killed in the Israeli bombings of Gaza. “We are not numbers,” reads the banner, written in English and Arabic.
Torrential rain fell yesterday on Ramallah, where the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) has its headquarters, chaired by Mahmoud Abbas, against whom the Israeli Prime Minister, Beniamin Netanyahu, attacked on Sunday, after the Palestinian Government abounded in journalistic information that claims that an Israeli helicopter killed some of the young people who died on October 7 at the electronic party in the desert, next to the border with Gaza. “Abu Mazen – the popular name for Abbas – who in the past denied the existence of the Holocaust, today denies the existence of the Hamas massacre and that is unacceptable,” Netanyahu declared in a statement.
This journalist did not find anyone in Ramallah who defended the Hamas attack. Neither did the Israeli bombings. All the residents of the West Bank consulted by La Vanguardia want the war to end as soon as possible and do not believe that it will extend to this other occupied territory because they agree that Hamas has little role here and that, furthermore, the Palestinian armed groups - with a presence above all in Jenin, Nablus and Hebron – do not have the military capacity of the Islamist organization that Israel is trying to annihilate in Gaza at any cost, in Palestinian lives.
