Israeli-Palestinian conflict enters 10th day as pressure builds for ceasefire

Israeli strikes on Gaza continued for the 10th consecutive day Wednesday, as pressure builds for a ceasefire to halt the conflict.

Four Palestinians, including a local journalist, were killed and 10 others wounded in a series of raids launched by Israeli warplanes on different areas of Gaza on Wednesday, according to the official Palestinian news agency WAFA.

The journalist, Yusef Abu Hussein, was a broadcaster with Gaza radio station Al Aqsa Radio. He was killed in an Israeli strike targeting a house near the Sheikh Radwan cemetery, north of Gaza City, the WAFA report said.

Overnight, Israeli warplanes launched a series of airstrikes on several Hamas targets in the Khan Yunis and Rafah areas of southern Gaza, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) said. The 25-minute-long attack by 52 fighter jets destroyed “about 40 underground targets,” the IAF said in a tweet.

Among the targets were “a weapons depot” located in offices belonging to Hamas’ internal security headquarters in Khan Yunis, and “a command and control center” in Rafah, according to the IAF.

As of 7 a.m. Wednesday local time, about 3,750 rockets had been fired from Gaza, of which 550 had failed and fallen within Gaza, the IAF said.

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a briefing Tuesday that attacks on Hamas’ extensive network of tunnels would be expanded to other parts of Gaza.

The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health said 219 people, including 63 children, had been killed and 1,500 others injured in the current round of violence. More than 58,000 people are considered internally displaced, many of them finding shelter in dozens of schools, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

At least 12 people in Israel have been killed in fire from since the start of the recent violence.

Now into its second week, this is the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian confrontation since the two sides fought a war in 2014.

The White House scaled up the rhetoric on Wednesday, in a dramatic escalation in its public messaging, saying President Biden told Netanyahu “that he expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire” in their fourth phone call over the past week.

Speaking Tuesday following a visit to the Israeli air force base at Hatzerim, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said operations would continue “as necessary to restore peace to the citizens of Israel.”

Referring to Israel’s attacks on Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Netanyahu said: “I have no doubt that we took them back many years.”

Netanyahu’s comments came after protests took place in a number of towns in the West Bank yesterday. Thousands gathered in various towns in the West Bank, including Ramallah and Hebron, on Tuesday after a number of Palestinian groups, including Hamas militants in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank, called for mass strikes.

“The first priority for the Palestinian political leadership now is to have Israel stop its crimes and massacres against our people in Gaza,” Wasel Abu Yousef, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Executive Committee in Ramallah, told CNN on Tuesday.

A 25-year-old Palestinian was killed and two Israeli soldiers were wounded in an altercation Tuesday in Ramallah, according to health authorities in the West Bank and the IDF.

The IDF said it responded to incoming live rounds at its position which resulted in two soldiers getting wounded in the legs.

Calls for ceasefire

Attempts to negotiate a truce between Israel and militants in Gaza has so far proven difficult.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke with Jordanian King Abdullah II on Tuesday; both leaders supported efforts to reach a ceasefire, according to Merkel’s spokesperson.

French President Emmanuel Macron also spoke with the Jordanian leader, alongside Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, on Tuesday. They agreed to push the peace process forward and reaffirmed the need “to protect Palestinians, stop all illegal Israeli violations and measures in Jerusalem, and end the aggression on Gaza,” a statement said.

Egypt and Qatar’s efforts to broker a truce have stalled over two main points, a senior Hamas leader with direct knowledge of mediation efforts told CNN on Sunday.

One stumbling block is Israel’s insistence that Hamas must initiate the ceasefire, at least three hours before Israel, at which point Israel would follow. Hamas flatly rejected this proposal, the Hamas leader said.

The Hamas source said the other hurdle is Hamas’ insistence that any ceasefire must include the ending of Israel’s “provocations” at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem — the third holiest site in Islam — and a resolution of the situation in Sheikh Jarrah, an East Jerusalem neighborhood where several Palestinian families face eviction.

A pro-Jewish settler organization called Nahalat Shimon is using a 1970 law to argue the owners of the land in question before 1948 were Jewish families, and so the current Palestinian landowners should be evicted and their properties given to Israeli Jews.

Palestinians say restitution laws in Israel are unfair because they have no legal means to reclaim property they lost to Jewish families in the late 1940s in what became the state of Israel.