UN says Gaza economy could take decades to recover from Bombing Raids

This draft resolution could put sensitive negotiations in jeopardy – derailing the exhaustive, ongoing diplomatic efforts to secure the release of hostages, and secure an extended pause that Palestinian civilians and aid workers so desperately need (above a immediate ceasefire)?

The USA, Israel, Egypt and Qatar last week drafted a proposal for an extended pause in fighting and are awaiting a response from Hamas. The only truce, so far, lasted a week in late November, 2023.

However, if accepted and implemented, this proposal would move all parties one step closer to creating the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities.

The USA and Israel oppose a ceasefire, believing it would only benefit Hamas. Washington, instead, supports pauses in fighting to protect civilians and free hostages taken by Hamas.

Washington traditionally shields its ally Israel from UN action and has already twice vetoed Council action since 7 October, 2023.

But it has also abstained twice, allowing the Council to adopt resolutions that aimed to boost humanitarian aid to Gaza and called for urgent and extended humanitarian pauses in fighting.

To be adopted, UN Security Council resolution needs at least nine votes in favor and no vetoes by the United States, Britain, France, China or Russia.

Israeli forces shelled the outskirts of the last refuge on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip on Friday, where the displaced population, penned against the border fence in their hundreds of thousands, feared a new assault with nowhere left to flee.

More than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are now homeless and crammed into Rafah.

Tens of thousands more have arrived in recent days, carrying belongings in their arms and pulling children on carts, since Israeli forces last week launched one of the biggest bloody assaults of the war to capture adjacent Khan Yunis, the main southern city.

Most of Gaza’s population are in Rafah. If the tanks storm in, it will be a massacre like never before during this war.

Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, said on Thursday that troops would now eliminate terror elements in Rafah, one of the few areas not yet taken in an almost four-month-old assault.

As the only part of Gaza with access to the limited food and medical aid trickling across the border, Rafah and nearby parts of Khan Yunis have become a warren of makeshift tents, clogged by winter mud.

Wind and cold add to the misery, blowing tents down or flooding them and the ground in-between.

The United Nations says rescuers can no longer reach the sick and wounded on the battlefield in Khan Yunis, and the prospect of combat reaching Rafah is almost unthinkable.

The Gaza war was triggered by fighters from the Hamas group, who stormed across the border fence into Israel on 7 October, killing 1,200 people and capturing 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

However, since then, it has been revealed by Haaretz that helicopters and tanks of the Israeli army had, in fact, killed many of the 1,139 soldiers and civilians claimed by Israel to have been killed by the Palestinian Resistance.

Imagery analyzed by the UN Satellite Center shows that 30% of Gaza’s buildings have also been destroyed or damaged in the Israeli offensive.

Hamas’s armed wing said on Friday it had killed 15 Israeli soldiers in battles west of Gaza City, although no confirmation was immediately available from Israel.

So far, Israel has confirmed the loss of well over 200 of its soldiers during the last attack on civilian properties.

Mediators are awaiting a response from Hamas to a proposal drafted last week with Israeli and US spy chiefs and passed on by Egypt and Qatar, for the war’s first extended ceasefire.

On another front, the Israeli military said it had intercepted a missile heading for Israel in the area of the Red Sea, and Yemen confirmed they had fired ballistic missiles in the direction of the Israeli port and resort city of Eilat.

Middle East Monitor / ABC Flash Point News 2024.