Israeli forces on Thursday battled Hamas in Gaza where air strikes and urban combat rocked the southern city of Khan Yunis, near where many hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge.
UN World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for “urgent steps to alleviate the grave peril” facing besieged Gaza’s people, including “terrible injuries, acute hunger and… severe risk of disease”.
In Jerusalem, families of hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza again rallied for their release, and a kibbutz announced that a 70-year-old US-Israeli thought to be the oldest woman held captive had died in the October 7 attacks.
US President Joe Biden said he was “devastated” by the news that Judith Weinstein Haggai was dead, and pledged that Washington will “not stop working” with its ally Israel to bring the remaining hostages home.
Akin to Holocaust
Mia Schem, the 21-year-old hostage released by Hamas during the weeklong November temporary ceasefire said her 54 days in Hamas captivity in Gaza Strip was akin to the Holocaust while speaking to Israeli broadcaster Channel 13.
“It was important to me to relay the truth about the nature of the people who live in Gaza, who they are truly are, and what I experienced there,” Schem was quoted as saying by Channel 13. Schem’s video was released by Hamas in November where she was heard urging the Israeli government to free her and receiving treatment in her injured hand.
The woman was kidnapped from the Supernova music festival from southern Israel during the October 7 attacks. She said she was kept in a civilian family’s home in Gaza and expressed her surprise at the presence of children and women.
“Everyone there were terrorists… Entire families are in the service of Hamas. I began asking myself questions: Why am I being held in some family’s household? Why are there children here? Why is there a woman here?” Schem said.
Quadruplets born in war
More than 80 percent of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been driven from their homes, the UN says, and many now live in cramped shelters or makeshift tents in the far south, around the city of Rafah near Egypt.
In the central al-Maghazi refugee camp, which was targeted on Sunday by a strike that killed at least 70 people, resident Waleed Mohammed Aeid voiced his pain and frustration.
“They told us to go to Rafah, but we don’t want to,” he said. “Why? To go live in the streets there?
“All the neighbourhood here was evacuated. They bombed the school, but we didn’t leave because we don’t have anywhere else to go.”
One of the many Palestinians displaced, 28-year-old Iman al-Masry, recently gave birth to quadruplets in southern Gaza after fleeing her home in the devastated north.
The arduous journey “affected my pregnancy”, she said, recounting that she gave birth by C-section on December 18 to two girls and two boys, one of whom was too fragile to leave hospital.
“They are very slim,” she said, speaking in a schoolroom turned shelter in Deir al-Balah. “It’s cold and windy and there’s no bathtub… I just use wipes.”
(with inputs from AFP)
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