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On Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden will pay a high-profile visit to Israel to show support for its war against Hamas. This comes after Washington said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had agreed to let aid get to Gazans who are under lockdown.
Trucks bringing essential supplies for Gaza were heading towards the Rafah crossing in Egypt. This is the only way to get to the enclave that is not controlled by Israel, but it was unclear if the trucks would be able to make it across.
A witness told Reuters that 160 trucks had left the nearby Egyptian town of Al-Arish for the border. They had been stuck there for days while officials tried to open the route.
After Hamas gunmen killed 1,300 people, mostly civilians, in a rampage through southern Israeli towns on Oct. 7, the deadliest day in Israel’s 75-year history, the country has vowed to destroy the Hamas movement that rules Gaza.
Over 2,800 Palestinians, mostly children, have been killed by Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip. About half of the 2.3 million people who live there have been forced to leave their houses. It has completely cut off the enclave from food, fuel, and emergency supplies, which are running out very quickly.
Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, announced Biden’s visit after hours of talks with Netanyahu. He said Netanyahu agreed to work with him to come up with a way to get humanitarian help to people in Gaza. He didn’t say anything.
“The president will hear from Israel what it needs to defend its people as we continue to work with Congress to meet those needs,” said Blinken.
Biden will also “hear from Israel how it will conduct its operations in a way that minimises civilian casualties and enables humanitarian assistance to flow to civilians in Gaza in a way that does not benefit Hamas” , he said.
Washington is also trying to get Arab countries to work together to stop a bigger war in the region. This is because Iran promised “preemptive action” from the “resistance front” of its supporters, which includes the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon.
Biden is going to Israel and then likely go to Jordan to meet King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Mahmoud Abbas, who is the president of the Palestinian Authority and a foe of Hamas. The Palestinian Authority has limited autonomy in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
LIFTING RUBBLE WITH BARE HANDS
People in Jabalia, which is in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, were digging through a huge, smoking bomb crater with their naked hands, pulling bodies out from under the rubble. They were screaming in fear as they did this. Others ran with stretchers carrying hurt people.
A man came out of a destroyed building with the frozen body of a child in his arms. The boy’s body was covered in chalky soot.
At least 49 people were killed overnight in airstrikes on homes in Khan Younis, the enclave’s largest city in the south.
When Amin Hneideq woke up, there was a loud blast that broke the window and cut his daughter’s head. The bomb didn’t hit his house, but it did destroy a nearby house and kill a family from the north who had followed Israeli orders to run to safety in the south.
“They came from the north just to attack them in the south,” Hneideq said as he sobbed.
UNRWA, the UN organisation for Palestinian refugees, said that Israel had opened a single water line to Khan Younis on Monday for three hours, but that only about 14% of people in Gaza could use it.
“Concerns over dehydration and waterborne diseases are high given the collapse of water and sanitation services, including today’s shutdown of Gaza’s last functioning seawater desalination plant,” UNRWA stated in a statement.
“People will start dying without water.”
Washington wants to open the Rafah crossing so that Gazans with foreign passports, such as a few hundred Palestinian Americans, can leave. They also want to get help through it. On Monday, Gazans who had more than one passport tried to get to Rafah but were told they couldn’t because of Israeli air strikes.
Egypt has said it could let medical evacuations go through the crossing, but it doesn’t want a mass flight because Arab countries say that would be like the Palestinians being kicked off their land, which is not acceptable. The vast majority of Gazans who don’t have dual citizenship are not allowed to leave.
CLASHES IN ISRAEL’S NORTH
Israel is planning to invade Gaza on the ground to get rid of Hamas. At the same time, fighting between Israel and Hezbollah has gotten worse on the northern border with Lebanon. Gaza-Israel war is getting worse day by day
The Israeli army said on Tuesday that it had killed four people who were trying to cross the border to set off bombs. On Monday, Israel told people in 28 towns in a 2-km-deep (1.2-mile) area near the border with Lebanon to leave.
Iran has praised Hamas’s strikes on Israel, even though it says it had nothing to do with them. Hossein Amirabdollahian, the foreign minister of Iran, told state TV that Israel would not be able to do anything in Gaza without getting in trouble. He also said that “preemptive action” would be taken in the next few hours.
“All options are open and we cannot be indifferent to the war crimes committed against the people of Gaza,” said Amirabdollahian. “The resistance front is capable of waging a long-term war with the enemy.”
On Monday, Netanyahu told the house, “Iran and Hezbollah, don’t test us in the north.” Don’t go through the same thing you did before. Because you will have to pay a much higher price today.”
Israel has told more than a million people in the northern half of the region to leave for their safety as it sends more troops to the border with Gaza. They should stay where they are because Hamas told them to.
Even though tens of thousands of people have moved south, the UN says that moving that many people would be very bad for everyone.
UN says that a million people have already been forced to leave their homes in Gaza. Electricity is out, clean water is hard to come by, and hospital emergency generator fuel is running low.
