Israel-Hamas War Israel Launches Strikes and Orders Evacuations in Southern Gaza
More ethnic cleansing, after telling Gaza's to move South the Israel's are bombing in the South. They have murdered over 15,000 people.Gaza City Dec. 2, 6:05 p.m.
The Israeli military heavily bombarded southern Gaza on Saturday and ordered residents of several Palestinian border towns in the area to leave their homes, appearing to set the stage for a ground invasion in the south as hostilities resumed after the collapse of a weeklong truce with Hamas.
The Israeli demand for evacuations evoked similar orders the military gave before invading northern Gaza in late October, and it added to the fear and uncertainty hanging over Gaza’s 2.2 million people as a new phase appeared to begin in the nearly two-month war.
After a week of calm, Yousef Hammash woke up in the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Friday to the booming sounds of explosions. The brief feeling of safety he had felt was over, he thought.
“Seven weeks of madness have been followed by seven days of humanitarian pause,” Mr. Hammash, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s advocacy officer in Gaza, said in a voice message. “And now, we are back to the cycle of violence again.”
The fragile truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed on Friday morning because the adversaries could not find common ground for further exchanges of hostages and prisoners, according to Israeli and Hamas officials.
Publicly, Israel and Hamas blamed each other for military activity that violated the weeklong cease-fire. Israel said Hamas had fired rockets from Gaza into southern Israel, while Hamas said Israeli troop operations had resumed in northern Gaza. But two Israeli officials and Zaher Jabareen, a Hamas official who oversees prisoner issues, said the real reason the pause ended was a stalemate in prisoner-hostage swap negotiations.
Nurit Cooper, 79, is one of the Israeli hostages released by Hamas. But her son, Rotem Cooper, continues to press for the urgent release of the remaining hostages, especially those who are old and sick.
He has a personal stake in the matter. His father, Amiram Cooper, who will turn 85 on Dec. 11, remains a hostage.
When Noam Or, 17, and his sister, Alma, 13, were released from Gaza on Saturday, they hoped that their parents might be there to welcome them. They were kidnapped from Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7 and held hostage for 50 days, and they had not heard any news about their mother, Yonat, or their father, Dror.
But shortly after they were freed, other family members told them more of what had happened the day they were taken: Their father was taken, too. And their mother had been killed.
Israel released a total of 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees in exchange for 105 hostages freed by Hamas during a weeklong pause in hostilities, an arrangement that diplomats had tried to extend before it collapsed into fighting on Friday morning.
A New York Times analysis of data on the Palestinians released showed that a majority of them had not been convicted of a crime. There were 107 teenagers under 18, including three girls. Another 66 teenagers were 18 years old. The oldest person released was a 64-year-old woman.
Representative Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said on Friday that his home had been vandalized by people advocating for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Smith said that the garage at the congressman’s home in Bellevue, Wash., had been marked with red paint that included messages calling for a cease-fire. His office provided images of messages that included “Baby Killer” and “Free Gaza” and “Cease Fire!”
A protester self-immolated on Friday afternoon outside of the Israeli Consulate building in Atlanta, in what the police described as “likely an extreme act of political protest.”
A security guard tried to intervene but was unsuccessful, officials said. The demonstrator sustained third-degree burns to the body, and the guard was burned on his wrist and leg. Both were taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, where the protester was in critical condition."
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