The road that runs parallel to the Dead Sea through the West Bank looks like a desert piece of Israel. Just after the Kalya kibbutz, to the south, there is a promontory with privileged views of the great salt lake where some Israelis bring their chairs, buy a drink from the food cart and sit down to pass the Good Friday while watching 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 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 it despite being in the West Bank. Except for the city of Jericho and some Arab enclaves, the inhabitants are settlers, some of whom operate hotels or palm groves. The road that comes from Ramallah and Jerusalem is also mostly Area C. The road is marked by Bedouin camps and Israeli flags put up by the Government after the terrorist attack by Hamas, which mark the occupation.
The Dead Sea is 300 meters deep and dries up at the rate of one meter every year. The Jordan, which empties into the Dead Sea, also dries up. The Palestinian authorities report that the main reason for the loss of water is the supply of the settlements and ensure that they do not have a consumption limit, while Arab farmers face the frequent denial of permits for irrigation water.
Drinking water is what Gaza needs, where humanitarian aid comes in at a trickle and is now only distributed in the south, as reported by the UN yesterday. "The central area of Gaza is virtually cut off from the south, due to Israel's movement restrictions on the main roads," indicated the daily report of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid, which assured that, with the With the exception of some medical supplies from the World Health Organization (WHO), the arrival of groceries has been interrupted in Khan Iunis, a town that still concentrates most of the fighting.
He also reports that only 14 of the 36 hospitals in the strip are functioning, and only two are in the north, an area that Israel ordered to evacuate, but where many civilians remain. Al-Awda, in Jabalia, is one of these two centers, which serves as a refuge for many people who are not allowed to leave, as one of these people reported to La Vanguardia, who assures that Israel threatens them with snipers , a fact that the aforementioned UN report corroborates. The flogging in the hospital was also denounced by the director of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “The reports of the siege of Al-Awda hospital, which is minimally functioning in northern Gaza, are extremely worrying. There are still patients and health personnel inside the facility, who must be protected," tweeted Ghebreyesus.
For its part, Médecins Sans Frontières added yesterday to the pressure on the UN Security Council to decree a ceasefire and stop the "indiscriminate killings and forced displacements on a shocking scale and intensity". In a statement, the oenagé cites as an example that Al-Aqsa hospital alone received 1,149 emergency patients between December 1 and 7, 350 of whom arrived dead. On December 6, the hospital received more dead 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 they were "men of military age who were discovered in areas that civilians were supposed to have evacuated weeks ago,” thus implicitly confirming that these are preventive detentions. The London-based media outlet The New Arab reported that one of its journalists was among those arrested in the images. Among the displays of indignation at the images, there is that of the Society of Palestinian Prisoners, whose president, Abdullah Zgari, issued a statement denouncing "the shocking and horrific scenes" of detainees "naked and incarcerated in degrading conditions of human dignity".
The army maintains that Khan Iunis is the "main bastion" of Hamas and that it is carrying out a "fast, powerful and focused" operation, despite the fact that the battle has been going on for days and that the city has been bombed indiscriminately, like all the 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 7th century monument.
And meanwhile, in Iraq, five projectiles were launched yesterday against the US embassy in Baghdad without causing any casualties, in an attack that analysts link to the massacre in Gaza.
