Resumes reporting
Back in Gaza, Mohyeldin resumes reporting.
Back inside #Gaza. Went straight to morgue. Emotional scene as families identify & claim bodies of the killed in #Israeli attacks #Shejaiya
— Ayman (@AymanM) July 20, 2014
No time limit
Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon says there is no time limit on Operation Protective Edge and that the campaign could continue until rocket fire ceases from Gaza. Addressing a parliamentary committee:
If needed we will recruit more reservists in order to continue the operation as long as necessary until the completion of the task and the return of the quiet in the whole of Israel, especially from the threat of the Gaza Strip.
U.S. travel warning
0 CommentsThe State Department warns U.S. citizens of ‘the risks of traveling to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza due to ongoing hostilities’ and advises deferring non-essential travel.
The security environment remains complex in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, and US citizens need to be aware of the risks of travel to these areas because of the current conflict between Hamas and Israel. Travelers should avoid areas of Israel in the vicinity of the Gaza Strip due to the real risks presented by small arms fire, anti-tank weapons, rockets, and mortars, as attacks from Gaza can come with little or no warning
The U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv is working on reduced staffing and providing only emergency consular services, however is says it is not evacuating U.S. citizens out of Israel
‘Resistance will defeat Israel’
Nasrallah says Hezbollah organization is confident Hamas will defeat Israel in the 2014 Gaza conflict:
Hezbollah and the Lebanese resistance stand firmly on the side of the Intifada and the Palestinian people’s resistance, and support Hamas’ strategy and the just conditions it has set to end the conflict
Referring to Israel’s failure to crush Hezbollah in July 2006, he has…
…complete confidence in the resistance’s capacity to defend itself and to achieve a new victory in July
In a separate phone call to Islamic Jihad secretary general Ramadan Abdallah Challah:
The Lebanese resistance is willing to cooperate completely, in order to realise the goals of the Palestinian resistance, and to ensure the failure of the [Israeli] aggression
548 Palestinian deaths in two weeks
0 CommentsGaza health officials say that as many as 548 Palestinians have died in the first 14 days of the 2014 Gaza conflict, after four are killed when the Al Aqsa Martyrs hospital is hit by shelling and as the Operation Protective Edge campaign continues to focus on the Shujai’iya neighbourhood, where 120 people have died in a single day. UN chief Ban Ki Moon at a conference in Doha:
Too many innocent people are dying … [and] living in constant fear
500 Palestinians, 20 Israelis dead
At least 500 Palestinians and 20 Israelis have been killed and tens of thousands of Gaza residents have been displaced in two weeks of fighting between Israel and Hamas, with more than half of the Palestinian victims – 268 people – killed in the first five days of the ground offensive of Operation Protective Edge.
UN: ‘Serious concern’
The UN expresses serious concern about rising numbers of casualties in Gaza, and issues a call for an immediate ceasefire as Israel launches fresh strikes in the Palestinian territory. The the international body’s 15-member Security Council is meeting as the death toll from Israel’s Operation Protective Edge rises to 476 after 120 people are killed in a single day in Gaza, the bloodiest day in the enclave since Israel’s 2009 offensive. Rwandan Ambassador Eugene Richard Gasana, whose country chairs the council:
The members of the Security Council express serious concern about the growing numbers of casualties
Gaza official: shells hit hospital
0 CommentsIsraeli tank shells strike the Al Aqsa hospital in Gaza killing at least four people and injuring 60. The strike is reported to be the third hospital in Gaza that has been hit in Israel’s Operation Protective Edge. Footage on Hamas’ Al Aqsa television station shows casualties being moved into the emergency unit, while doctor Fayez Zidane tells the station that shells hit the third and fourth floor as well as the reception area. The Israeli military says it is looking into the report.
2,200 Jews ‘left France’
0 CommentsAround 2,200 Jews leave France in the first six months of the year amid what Jewish groups describe as a rise in anti-Semitism, with violent clashes increasing along with rising social tensions as Israel launches the Operation Protective Edge military campaign in Gaza. The number of emigrants in the same period a year earlier is only 600. France has the largest Muslim and Jewish communities in Europe and many of France’s Muslims are of Arabic origin from North Africa and relate to the Palestinian cause more than British Muslims, who are mostly South Asian in origin, while left-wing politics and France’s colonial history in Algeria also contribute to tensions. Georges Asaraf, the Jewish owner of a pizzeria in the suburb of Sarcelles whose windows are destroyed as protests turn violent:
They were after Israelites but we have always lived together as brothers
U.S. flights halted
0 CommentsThe US Government stops all flights to Tel Aviv for the next 24 hours, after plane had to be diverted when a rocket was fired near the Israeli city’s airport. Delta said its service between Ben Gurion and New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport will be suspended until further notice. Delta:
Delta continues to work closely with US and other government resources to monitor the situation.
649 Palestinian, 31 Israeli deaths in 15 days
Health officials say that at least 649 Palestinians have been killed in the first 15 days of the 2014 Gaza conflict and 4,120 wounded. It is unclear how many are civilian casualties – the Israel Defence Forces says it has killed up to 180 militants while the UN estimates that as many as 70%-80% of the dead are civilians. Israel confirms that 29 soldiers and two civilians have been killed while another soldier, Oren Shaul, is missing and presumed dead.
Strikes ‘home of military commander’
Israeli jets strike the home of Muhammad Deif in Khan Younis, however the official Hamas military commander no longer lives in the building and is thought to command the group’s military apparatus from unknown locations. He remains a top Israeli target.
‘Rockets in second school’
The UN Relief and Works Agency says it finds rockets in one of its schools in Gaza. The second such discovery in a week prompts the agency pledge a ‘comprehensive investigation into the circumstances surrounding this incident.
Today, in the course of the regular inspection of its premises, UNRWA discovered rockets hidden in a vacant school in the Gaza Strip. As soon as the rockets were discovered, UNRWA staff were withdrawn from the premises, and so we are unable to confirm the precise number of rockets. The school is situated between two other UNRWA schools that currently each accommodate 1,500 internally displaced persons.
Israeli Foreign Ministry:
How many more schools will have to be abused by Hamas missile squads before the international community will intervene […] How many times can it turn its head the other way and pretend that it just doesn’t see?
‘Tens of thousands’ at funeral
Israel’s Army Radio reports many as 20,000 attend the funeral of First Sgt. Nissim Sean Carmeli, the American-Israeli lone soldier killed in the Gaza strip during Operation Defensive Edge, and other media report as many as 18,000. Haifa’s main soccer club, Maccabi Haifa, which Carmeli supported, invites people to the city’s military cemetery to ‘come give final honors to a hero who was killed so that we can live.’
Sean Carmeli was a lone soldier and we don’t want his funeral to be empty […] That’s the least we can do for him and for our people.
$47 million aid
Kerry pledges $47 million humanitarian aid from the U.S. to Palestinians in the Gaza strip affected by the conflict. The State Department says $15 million will go to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and the remaining $32 million will come from USAID. In Cairo to meet Ban Ki-Moon:
We are deeply concerned about the consequences of Israel’s appropriate and legitimate effort to defend itself […] But always, in any conflict, there is concern about civilians — about children, women, communities that are caught in it.
16-year-old combatant captured
A 16-year-old Palestinian combatant is treated in Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital after being captured when emerging from a cross-border tunnel. Israel Radio describes him as being in moderate condition and says he was unconscious when hospitalized. A group of Hamas fighters dressed in Israel Defense Forces uniforms enters Israel near Kibbutz Nir Am and kills four IDF soldiers in a jeep before the Israeli squad returns fire, killing 10, while a second group crosses into Israel via a tunnel exiting near Erez, across the border from Beit Hanoun city, and clashes with IDF leaving several Gazans dead and no Israelis hurt. It is not stated which group the 16-year-old was part of. The report adds that IDF soldiers being treated in Israeli hospitals for combat wounds say they have encountered 13- and 14-year-old Palestinian children running at them wearing suicide-bomber explosive belts.
Will return
Commander Col. Rasan Alian says he will return to complete the elite Golani Brigade’s mission in the 2014 Gaza conflict after he is moderately wounded in an exchange of fire.
I want to go back to Gaza, and get to as many terrorists as possible
On heavy losses sustained by the unit:
I’d like to send a big hug to the bereaved families. I did not have a chance to meet them. We stand with them. They are strengthening us
Gaza tunnel network attack possible
An Israeli military official and politician say the Gaza tunnel network is ‘immense’ and creates a threat of a ‘mega-attack.’ Israel Defense Forces Capt. Eytan Buchman:
All of Gaza is an underground city, and the amount of infrastructure Hamas built up over the years is immense. There are tunnels, extended bunkers, weapons storage facilities, even within urban areas
Economy Minister Naftali Bennett:
There is a world of weapons tunnels penetrating into Israel, creating the possibility of a mega-attack
Attacked on air by ‘angry Israeli’
A BBC Arabic correspondent is attacked during a broadcast from a town near the Gaza border. BBC statement:
While reporting live from inside the Israeli city of Ashkelon this morning BBC Arabic reporter Feras Khatib was manhandled by an angry Israeli
He finishes the report without incident after members of the broadcast team remove the man from the area.
‘Accomplice to war crimes’
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency could be culpable as an accomplice to war crimes after it allegedly handed over rockets found in a UNRWA-run school to security forces run by Hamas. While the UN’s biggest agency subdivision, with 30,000 staff, apparently fulfilled its obligations by turning over the rockets to a Hamas-Fatah ‘unity’ police force, there is no public record of Fatah or non-Hamas ‘unity’ officials running a security force in the territory since the 2007 Hamas takeover, and the agency could have handed the rockets to a third party, placed them in an open field and notified the Israel Defense Forces of the location, or sought other options.
Israel Democracy Institute Vice President Prof. Mordechai Kremnitzer says the UNRWA’s actions are a ‘war crime,’ although he says that there could be no criminal prosecution since it could never be criminally proven that the particular rockets were used to target Israelis, while Hebrew University Professor and former Foreign Ministry Legal Advisor Robbie Sabel says the UNRWA had no legal obligation to hand the rockets over to Israel and says he ‘would not make a capital case,’ but says that while UNRWA chief Christopher Gunness may have been unaware of Hamas’ involvement in the security forces, UNRWA workers on the ground in Gaza must have known.