The road that runs parallel to the Dead Sea through the West Bank looks like a desert piece of Israel. Shortly after the Kalya kibbutz, heading south, there is a promontory with privileged views over the great salt lake where some Israelis take their chair, buy a drink from the food cart and sit down to spend the festive Friday observing the landscape with the Jordanian coast in the background, oblivious to the tragedy in Gaza or the growing tension in the main West Bank cities, which are only a handful of kilometers away.
In the Oslo accords of 1993, the entire Jordan River Valley and the Dead Sea coast came under Israeli administration within what is called Area C, where Palestinians cannot enter to go to the beach because, once again, There is a check point that prevents this despite being in the West Bank. Except for the city of Jericho and some Arab enclaves, its inhabitants are settlers, some of whom operate hotels or palm groves. The road coming from Ramallah and Jerusalem is also mostly Area C. The road is dotted with Bedouin camps and Israeli flags put up by the Government after the Hamas terrorist attack, highlighting the occupation.
The Dead Sea is 300 meters deep and dries at a rate of one meter a year. Also the Jordan, which empties into the Dead Sea, dries up. The Palestinian authorities denounce that the main reason for the loss of water is the supply of the settlements and assure that they have no consumption limit, while Arab farmers face the frequent denial of permits for irrigation water.
Drinking water is what Gaza needs, where humanitarian aid enters in dribs and drabs and is now only distributed in the south, according to the UN denounced yesterday. “Central Gaza is virtually disconnected from the south due to Israel's movement restrictions on major roads,” said the daily report from the Humanitarian Aid Coordination Office, which stated that, with the exception of some medical supplies, According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the arrival of supplies has been interrupted in Khan Yunis, a town that continues to concentrate most of the fighting.
It also reports that only 14 of the 36 hospitals in the strip are now functioning, and only two of them are in the north, an area that Israel ordered evacuated, but where many civilians remain. Al Awda, in Jabaliya, is one of those two centers that serves as a refuge for many people who are not allowed to leave, according to what one of these people reported to La Vanguardia, who claims that Israel threatens them with snipers, which The aforementioned UN report corroborates. The harassment of this hospital was also denounced by the director of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “Reports of the siege of the minimally functioning Al Awda hospital in northern Gaza are extremely worrying. There are still patients and health personnel inside the facility, who must be protected,” Ghebreyesus tweeted.
For its part, Doctors Without Borders yesterday joined the pressure on the UN Security Council to declare a ceasefire and stop the “indiscriminate killings and forced displacements on an overwhelming scale and intensity.” In a statement, the NGO gives as an example that at the Al Aqsa hospital alone “1,149 patients were received in the emergency room between December 1 and 7, 350 of whom arrived dead. On December 6, the hospital received more deceased patients than injured patients.”
Regarding the videos released on Thursday showing dozens of semi-naked detainees sitting on the ground, Israeli Government spokesman Eylon Levy said that they are “men of military age who were discovered in areas that were supposed to be civilians had evacuated weeks ago”, implicitly confirming that these were preventive detentions. The New Arab media, based in London, reported that among the detainees who appear in the images is one of its journalists. Among the signs of indignation over the images is that of the Palestinian Prisoners Society, whose president, Abdullah Zghari, issued a statement denouncing “the shocking and horrible scenes” of detainees “naked and held in conditions degrading human dignity.” .
The army claims that Khan Yunis is the “main stronghold” of Hamas and that it is carrying out a “rapid, powerful and focused” operation, despite the fact that the battle has already been going on for days and that the city has been bombed indiscriminately, like the entire city. strip, with half a thousand bombs by land, sea and air in the last 48 hours. Israel destroyed the Al Omari mosque in Gaza City, the oldest in the strip, a monument from the 7th century.
And meanwhile, in Iraq, five projectiles were launched yesterday at the US embassy in Baghdad without causing any casualties, in an attack that analysts link to the Gaza massacre.
