A large poster of Maruan Barghouti raising his handcuffed hands and making the V for victory presides over the entrance to the modest office of the Palestinian Prisoners Society, located on the second floor of a dilapidated building far from the center of Ramallah. Known as the Palestinian Mandela, Barghouti is the leader of Tanzim, the military branch of Al Fatah – the party of the president of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), Mahmoud Abbas – and has been imprisoned since 2002, serving a life sentence for several murders.
Opinion polls assure that a large majority of Palestinians would vote for Barghouti in an election to replace Abbas. His image generates a broad consensus in the atomized political landscape of Palestine and would even attract Hamas voters, with whose leaders he has always maintained good relations despite the rift between the Islamist organization and the secular environment of Fatah. Despite being in prison, Barghouti won a seat in the Palestinian Parliament in the last elections in 2006.
Barghouti is in Ofer prison, near Ramallah, from where the 240 Palestinian prisoners released by Israel during the seven-day truce were released. The president of the Palestinian Prisoners Society, Abdalah Zgari, assures La Vanguardia that one of the released prisoners has already been imprisoned again in one of the raids that Israeli troops carry out daily at any point in the West Bank, where it is already common for kill some Palestinian. Yesterday there were three. And it has been 263 since the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, which sparked the war. Zgari describes the Israeli bombings on Gaza as “genocide” and denounces that “Israel destroys our lives every day”, also in the West Bank, where he assures that 3,580 people have already been detained since October 7, the vast majority preventively. He claims there are nearly 8,000 Palestinian prisoners, 880 of whom are minors.
Fatah rules the West Bank but Beniamin Netanyahu does not want him to govern Gaza, contradicting the opinion of many countries, including the United States. The Israeli Prime Minister reiterated this yesterday, after Abbas expressed his willingness to assume control of the strip after the war. “That won't happen,” Netanyahu tweeted, keeping the mystery about what his plan for Gaza is when he takes down Hamas. The premier accused the ANP of “supporting terrorist families.”
On a military level, ground combat continues to focus on Khan Younis, with Israeli troops already in the center of this city in the south of the strip. Netanyahu assured last night that the army was surrounding the house of Yahya Sinuar, leader of Hamas in Gaza, born in the Khan Younis refugee camp. However, the premier acknowledged that Sinuar is hidden. “His home is not his castle and he can flee, but it is only a matter of time until we find him,” said Netanyahu, who also yesterday spoke with the president of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, to turn to Qatar and “demand” so that the organization can visit and care for Israelis kidnapped in Gaza.
On the other hand, Yemen's Houthi rebels attacked Israel again yesterday with ballistic missiles, which were intercepted by the Israeli air defense. One of the missiles was aimed at the city of Eilat, on the Red Sea coast.
And in the international arena, Vladimir Putin yesterday made a strange whirlwind visit to the Middle East, escorted throughout the entire journey by four Russian fighters. In the United Arab Emirates, he met with its president, Mohamed bin Zayed, and both advocated a “ceasefire” in Gaza and “a permanent and comprehensive peace in the region based on the two-state solution,” according to the agency. WAM officer. He then traveled to Saudi Arabia, where he was received by the crown prince, Mohamed bin Salman.
In New York, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, raised his voice again and, for the first time since he began his mandate in 2017, invoked Article 99 of the United Nations Charter, which exceptionally implies “calling the attention of the Security Council. He again called for a ceasefire and for the Council to meet and “press to avoid a human catastrophe” in Gaza “given the magnitude of loss of human life in such a short period of time.”
