Khan Yunis:

Lying bedridden in her room at the recently reopened Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in Gaza, Alaa Abu Ahmed is relieved that she can finally restart her medical treatment.

Displacement because of fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas militants in the Palestinian territory interrupted Abu Ahmed’s treatment for a chronic condition.

Over a week in February, the hospital was attacked when Khan Yunis was the focus of fighting and soldiers raided it, saying Hamas was holding Israeli hostages there.

Now hallways are filled with still-wrapped boxes of equipment, and some semblance of order is returning to the facility.

While air strikes, bombardment and fighting continue to rock other areas of Gaza, in Nasser the beds have been straightened, the debris cleared and white coats bearing Doctors Without Borders (MSF) logos mix with the blue uniforms of local medics.

The international NGO has just resumed work at the hospital, the most important in the southern Gaza Strip.

“Thank God MSF was able to start working again at Nasser Hospital and I returned for treatment,” Abu Ahmed said.

“My condition has improved, but I did spend some time afraid that what happened at Al-Shifa hospital would repeat itself,” she added of the territory’s largest hospital, in Gaza City.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Al-Shifa has been reduced to an “empty shell” by fighting.

Humanitarian catastrophe

Just 13 out of 36 hospitals in the territory are “partially” functional, according to WHO, after unrelenting Israeli bombardment began in October.

When Israel withdrew its troops from Khan Yunis in early April, after months of fierce battles with Hamas created a humanitarian catastrophe, MSF returned to Nasser and resumed operations in mid-May, focusing on orthopaedic surgery and the burns unit.

In one bed lay a girl with a burned face, in another a silent boy with a bandaged leg watched over by a relative. A girl wearing a red dress cried as a doctor examined her.

The repeated evacuation or closure of hospitals because of fighting or Israeli leaflets ordering Gazans to leave the area “greatly handicap the delivery of medical care to the Palestinian population”, said Aurelie Godard, who oversees MSF activities in Gaza.

Now MSF is preparing to reopen the Nasser’s maternity and neonatal intensive care units.

“Evacuating or reopening is difficult every time. Especially for the patients, because they have to know where to find us; they have to know what services and what care is available in what place,” Godard said.

“It’s difficult for us, because obviously there’s all the equipment, the medicines, the machines… to transport, to repair sometimes,” she added.

‘Living in a desert’

WHO said Friday it had received no medical equipment in Gaza since May 6, the eve of Israel’s offensive on Rafah city in Gaza’s far south which led to the closure of the main aid entry points into the territory.

Since then almost no aid has made it into Gaza, the UN and NGOs say.

The Israeli military cut off electricity to Gaza at the beginning of the war, triggered by an unprecedented Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, and international organisations fear a total depletion of fuel to run generators.

More and more people are leaving Rafah, where the UN says Israel’s offensive has forced around 800,000 people to flee, hoping to find refuge in Khan Yunis.

Near Nasser hospital, plastic containers are piled up at water distribution points.

“People just appear to be alive on the outside,” said Mohammed Baroud, who was displaced from Rafah to Khan Yunis.

He said “everything is destroyed” in the area around Nasser Hospital.

“Water is not available. We search for even a few drops of water,” he said, adding that to get that they have to come a long way.

“Water is very scarce,” he said. “It’s like living in a desert.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Jerusalem:

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Tuesday Israel was prepared to “deepen” its Gaza operation if truce talks fail to secure the release of hostages Hamas holds in the Palestinian territory.

Israel is prepared to “make compromises” to get hostages out of Gaza, Gallant said after touring the Rafah area following an Israeli incursion at the Rafah border crossing in the territory’s south.

But “if that option is removed, we will go on and deepen the operation”, he warned in a statement.

Gallant’s comments came after Israeli negotiators arrived in Cairo for the latest effort towards a hostage release and ceasefire in the seven-month-old war.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement he had instructed Israel’s delegation to “stand firm on the conditions necessary for the release” of hostages held in Gaza since Hamas’s October 7 attack, and on “essential requirements for guaranteeing Israel’s security”.

The new talks come after Hamas announced late Monday it had accepted a ceasefire plan proposed by Egyptian and Qatari mediators, and said the ball was now in Israel’s court.

Despite months of shuttle diplomacy, mediators have so far failed to broker a new truce like the week-long ceasefire that saw 105 hostages released last November, the Israelis among them in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Previous negotiation efforts had stalled in part because of Hamas’s demand for a lasting ceasefire and Netanyahu’s vows to crush its remaining fighters in Rafah.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu said he had given the order late Monday to seize Rafah crossing, and that “within hours, our forces raised the Israeli flags at the Rafah crossing and took down the Hamas flags”.

“Seizing the passage in Rafah today is a very important step,” he said — “an important step on the way to destroying the remaining military capabilities of Hamas”.

Netanyahu maintained Tuesday that “this morning we denied Hamas a passage that was essential for establishing its reign of terror in the (Gaza) Strip”.

Gallant indicated that the limited Rafah incursion, launched after Israel ordered Palestinians in the east of the city to evacuate ahead of a long-threatened ground operation, could be lengthy.

“This operation will continue until we eliminate Hamas in the Rafah area and the entire Gaza Strip, or until the first hostage returns,” he said in his statement.

If hostages are not returned, Gallant said Israel would expand its operations “all over the Strip, in the south, in the centre and in the north”.

“Hamas only responds to force, so we will intensify our actions, and the military pressure will result in us crushing … Hamas.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

New Delhi:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shut down talks of ceasefire negotiations, citing an unwillingness to comply with Hamas’s conditions for ending the conflict in Gaza.

Here are 10 points on this big story:

As the Israel-Hamas war intensifies, a new video of Israel’s elite Egoz commando unit killing a group of Hamas operatives using drones and grenades in southern Gaza has surfaced online, as per a report in the New York Post.

The 28-second short clip shows the aftermath of a shootout between Israeli Defence Forces soldiers and two Hamas operatives, who were sheltering inside a structure in Khan Younis. The Israeli forces use a drone to determine the precise location of the shooters among the debris as the operatives shelter inside the crumbling structure.

Next, a commando manages to kill the Hamas members by carefully throwing a grenade out of a window. A quick glance reveals the dead Hamas operatives along with the weapons they seemed to be carrying.

In another incident shown on camera, the Egoz unit used a “pressure cooker” strategy to eliminate two operatives in a different part of Khan Younis by firing nonstop at them within a building, as per the outlet. In the aftermath, footage showed the IDF soldiers surveying the structure and firing many times as they went through each room until they found the dead Hamas operatives.

According to the IDF, the commandos discovered a weapons stockpile during the assault that contained many Kalashnikov rifles, magazine ammunition, grenades, and explosives.

Meanwhile, Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen clashed throughout the Gaza Strip over the weekend, both sides said on February 25, as mediating countries sought common ground for a possible ceasefire that would release hostages held by Hamas.

Prospects for securing any truce looked uncertain, however, with Israel saying it was, in parallel, planning to expand its sweep to destroy Hamas, while the Islamist faction stood firm on its demand for a permanent end to the nearly five-month-old war, as per Reuters.

Almost 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, Gaza medical officials say. The Hamas raid of October 7 killed 1,200 people in Israel, which has also lost 241 soldiers in Gaza ground fighting that followed, according to official tallies.