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.)

Doha:

Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh on Sunday accused Israel’s prime minister of sabotaging efforts by mediators involved in ongoing talks aimed at a truce and hostage exchange in Gaza.

Qatar-based Haniyeh said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to “invent constant justifications for the continuation of aggression, expanding the circle of conflict, and sabotaging efforts made through various mediators and parties”.

Qatari, Egyptian and US mediators met a Hamas delegation in Cairo on Saturday in the latest bid to halt the devastating almost seven-month-old war that has triggered worldwide protests.

A senior Hamas source close to the negotiations told AFP there would be “a new round” of talks on Sunday.

Negotiators seeking to halt the devastating war have proposed an initial 40-day pause in the fighting and an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners.

Haniyeh said Hamas had approached the talks with “seriousness and positivity” but questioned “the meaning of an agreement if a ceasefire is not its first result”.

Earlier Netanyahu had rejected Hamas’s demand to end the war.

Israel was “not ready to accept a situation in which the Hamas battalions come out of their bunkers, take control of Gaza again, rebuild their military infrastructure, and return to threaten the citizens of Israel”, he said.

Egypt, Qatar and the United States have been trying to mediate an agreement between Israel and Hamas for months.

The Qatar-based leader of Hamas’s political office said the United States had “provided cover for this occupation, should be the one to stop it instead of supplying it with weapons of destruction and extermination”.

Haniyeh added that Hamas “remains eager to reach a comprehensive and interconnected agreement in stages, ending the aggression, ensuring withdrawal, and achieving a serious prisoner exchange deal”.

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

Geneva:

The Gaza Strip is filled with more war debris and rubble than Ukraine, the head of UN demining operations for the narrow Palestinian territory said Wednesday.

And the danger for clearance work is restricted not just to unexploded ordnance but includes possible exposure to toxic substances such as asbestos.

The United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) estimated the amount of debris in Gaza at 37 million tonnes in mid-April, or 300 kilogrammes per square metre.

“Gaza has more rubble than Ukraine, and to put that in perspective, the Ukrainian front line is 600 miles (nearly 1,000 kilometres) long, and Gaza is 25 miles (40 km) long,” said Mungo Birch, head of the UNMAS programme in the Palestinian territories.

But the sheer volume of rubble is not the only problem, said UNMAS.

“This rubble is likely heavily contaminated with UXO (unexploded ordnance), but its clearance will be further complicated by other hazards in the rubble,” Birch told journalists.

“There’s estimated to be over 800,000 tonnes of asbestos, for instance, alone in the Gaza rubble.” The cancer-causing mineral used in construction requires special precautions when handling.

Birch said he hoped UNMAS, which works to mitigate the threats posed by all types of explosive ordnance, would become the coordination body for mine action in Gaza.

It has secured $5 million of funding but needs a further $40 million to continue its work in Gaza over the next 12 months.

However, “the sector as a whole will need hundreds of millions of US dollars over multiple years in order to make Gaza safe again for the population”, Birch added.

The Gaza war started after Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 34,568 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

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

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.