People who were injured during an Israeli operation in the Jabalia refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip arrive at Al-Ahli Arab hospital, on 21 October. (Photo: Omar Al-QAattaa / AFP) 
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken would make another push for a ceasefire in the Middle East this week, said the State Department, seeking to kick-start negotiations to end the Gaza war and also defuse the spillover conflict in Lebanon.
At least two people were killed and three others injured on Monday in an apparent guided missile attack on a car in the Mazzeh area of Damascus, said Syrian state television, quoting a military source.
Israeli forces besiege hospitals in northern Gaza
Israeli military forces besieged hospitals and shelters for displaced people in the northern Gaza Strip on Monday as they stepped up their operations, preventing critical aid from reaching civilians, said residents and medics.
Troops rounded up men and ordered women to leave the Jabalia historic refugee camp, they said. An Israeli airstrike on a house in Jabalia killed five people and wounded several others, said medics.
The UN Palestinian refugee agency Unrwa said Israeli authorities were preventing humanitarian missions from reaching areas in the north of the Palestinian enclave with critical supplies, including medicine and food.
“People attempting to flee are getting killed, their bodies left on the street,” said Unrwa head Philippe Lazzarini on X.
Medics at the Indonesian Hospital told Reuters that Israeli troops stormed a school and detained the men before setting it ablaze. The fire reached hospital generators and caused a power outage, they added.
Health officials said they had refused orders by the Israeli army, which started a new incursion into the territory’s north over two weeks ago, to evacuate the three hospitals in the area or leave the patients unattended.
Later on Monday, Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital said at least two critically wounded patients at the facility’s intensive care unit died because of the lack of medical supplies.
“The hospital’s blood units have run out completely... We are implementing a priority treatment method for patients. This is the reality,” said Abu Safiya in a video message to media outlets.
Troops remained outside the hospital but did not enter, they said. Medics at a second hospital, Kamal Adwan, reported heavy Israeli fire near the hospital at night.
“The army is burning the schools next to the hospital, and no one can enter or leave the hospital,” said a nurse at the Indonesian Hospital, who asked not to be named.
Palestinian health officials said at least 18 people had been killed in Jabalia and eight elsewhere in Gaza in Israeli strikes.
The Israeli military said in a statement its troops had dismantled infrastructure and tunnel shafts and killed alleged fighters in the Jabalia area.
Troops had helped thousands of civilians to evacuate safely through organised routes, it said, contradicting reports from the UN aid agency. Israel was in contact with the international community and Gaza’s healthcare system to ensure hospital emergency services were operating, it said.
Last week, the US told Israel it must take steps in the next month to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza or face potential restrictions on US military aid.
Israel has intensified its campaigns both in Gaza and Lebanon after the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar last week had raised hopes of an opening for ceasefire talks to end more than a year of conflict.
It has vowed to eradicate Hamas, the group that formerly controlled Gaza and whose attack on Israel last year triggered the war, but in doing so has laid waste to much of the territory and killed tens of thousands of people. More than 1.9 million people have been left destitute and desperate for food.
“We are facing death by bombs, by thirst and hunger,” said Raed, a resident of Jabalia camp. “Jabalia is being wiped out and there is no witness to the crime, the world is blinding its eyes.”
Hadeel Obeid, a supervisor nurse at the Indonesian hospital, said they were running out of medical supplies, including sterile gauze and medications. The water supply has been cut off and there was no food for the fourth consecutive day, she told Reuters.
The United Nations said it had been unable to reach the three hospitals in northern Gaza.
Unrwa’s Lazzarini said injured people were lying without care in hospitals that had been hit.
“Unrwa remaining shelters are so overcrowded, some displaced people are now forced to live in the toilets,” he said.
Israel says it is getting large quantities of humanitarian supplies into Gaza with land deliveries and airdrops. It also says it has facilitated the evacuation of patients from the Kamal Adwan Hospital.
Palestinians say no aid entered northern Gaza areas where the operation is active.
Elsewhere in the enclave, Israeli strikes killed at least five people in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip and four in two separate strikes in Gaza City, medics said.
The slain Sinwar was one of the alleged masterminds of the 7 October people, with about 253 more taken back to Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza has killed more than 42,500 Palestinians, with another 10,000 uncounted dead thought to lie under the rubble, Gaza health authorities say.
Blinken to make another push for Middle East ceasefires
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken would make another push for a ceasefire in the Middle East this week, said the State Department, seeking to kick-start negotiations to end the Gaza war and also defuse the spillover conflict in Lebanon.
Blinken’s trip to the region, his 11th since the attack on Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023 that triggered the Gaza war, came as Israel intensified its military campaign in Gaza, and in Lebanon against Hezbollah.
Israel has raised the stakes by assassinating the leaders of Hezbollah in Lebanon, including its veteran secretary-general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and of Hamas in Gaza while showing no sign of reining in its ground and aerial offensives.
Killing Sinwar last week after a year-long search was a major victory for Israel. But its leaders say the war must go on until the Islamist group is eliminated as a military and security threat to Israel.
Iran and its allies have said Sinwar’s death in a gun battle with Israeli soldiers in Gaza will strengthen their resolve.
Blinken would discuss with regional leaders the importance of ending the war in Gaza, ways to chart a post-conflict plan for the Palestinian enclave, and how to reach a diplomatic solution to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, said the State Department.
US envoy Amos Hochstein held talks with Lebanese officials in Beirut on Monday on conditions for a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah after Israel bombed branches across Lebanon of a financial institution linked to the group.
Israel has pursued a ground campaign over the past month after a year of border clashes touched off by Hezbollah rocket fire into Israel in support of Hamas in Gaza.
“Strike, strike, strike with planes and drones, and we don’t know who they are targeting and who will die each day,” said Micheline Jabbour, who works in a Beirut pastry shop.
Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said in Beirut that its priority was to achieve an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon, and called for Israel to withdraw promptly from any Lebanese territories it had occupied or entered.
Asked if Hezbollah could be destroyed, Aboul Gheit said: “You cannot destroy an idea.”
Lebanon’s health ministry said on Monday that the death toll since Israel’s offensive began had risen to 2,483, with 11,628 injured.
Fifty-nine people have been killed in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights over the same period, say Israeli authorities.
Israel’s campaign in Lebanon has driven 1.2 million people from their homes. It says it aims to drive Hezbollah fighters from the border region so tens of thousands of Israelis can return to homes they were forced to flee over the past year due to Hezbollah cross-border fire in solidarity with Palestinians.
Two killed in missile attack on car in Syrian capital
At least two people were killed and three others injured on Monday in an apparent guided missile attack on a car in the Mazzeh area of Damascus, said Syrian state television, quoting a military source.
The source attributed the attack to Israel.
The attack occurred near the Eastern Roundabout, close to the Golden Mazzeh Hotel, a high-end establishment in the centre of Syria’s capital, state media added.
An Israeli military spokesperson later claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it killed the head of Hezbollah’s money transfers unit.
“We will continue to act against Hezbollah in Syria and everywhere else,” said Israel’s chief military spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, in a televised statement.
US investigating IDF unit over human rights allegations
The US had launched a review of an Israel Defense Forces unit that could have implications on US assistance to Israel, reported Axios on Monday, citing two Israeli and two US officials.
The review focuses on the IDF’s “Force 100”, which is in charge of guarding detainees from Gaza, and no findings had been reached yet, reported Axios, citing a US official. Several members of the unit are currently on trial in Israel for allegedly sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee.
On the edge of Gaza, Israeli settlers want back in
Jewish settlers, including ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, gathered on the border of Gaza on Monday, where they called for settlements Israel evacuated two decades ago to be re-established in the war-torn Palestinian enclave.
Israel withdrew its military and settlers from Gaza in 2005 after a 38-year occupation, and Netanyahu has said it does not intend to maintain a permanent presence again.
But as Israel’s war on the enclave’s Hamas rulers has entered a second year, Netanyahu has yet to provide clarity on who he sees governing Gaza after the war. Some of his government allies, however, have been explicit about their endgame.
“If we want it, we can renew settlements in Gaza,” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told the hundreds who gathered for a two-day outdoor conference titled “Preparing to Resettle Gaza”, held about 3km from the enclave.
Smoke could be seen rising in Gaza and the loud bangs of artillery sounded in the distance.
Ben-Gvir also called for Israel to “encourage emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza. “It’s the best and most moral solution, not by force but by telling them: ‘We’re giving you the option, leave to other countries, the Land of Israel is ours’,” he said.
The conference was organised by members of Netanyahu’s Likud party and the Nahala organisation, a group of ideological settlers in the occupied West Bank, who see themselves as pioneers redeeming the Biblical heartland said to have been promised by God.
Most world powers deem settlements built in territory Israel seized in the 1967 war as illegal under international law and their expansion as an obstacle to peace, since they eat away at land the Palestinians want for a future state.
Israel disputes this view and cites Biblical and historical ties to the land, as well as security needs.
The settler movement has cast Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza as a fatal mistake that led to Hamas taking the territory over, enabling it to use Gaza as a base to fire thousands of rockets from it at Israel over the years and mounting last year’s devastating 7 October attack.
“In these critical days, while the state of Israel is looking to the day after, we want to raise awareness that only settlements will bring about the security we had 20 years ago,” said Itzik Fitoussi, who was evicted from Gaza’s settlements in 2005 and lost his soldier son on 7 October 2023.
Avivit John, from nearby Kibbutz Be’eri, which lost a 10th of its residents in the 7 October attack, was demonstrating against the settler conference. “We are against settlements in Gaza,” she said. “We want to live in peace with our [Palestinian] neighbours.”
Palestinians face grim olive harvest
Palestinian olive farmer Khitam Najjar dreams of just one season where she can gather the harvest in peace. But it’s not this year.
As she and her son approached their olive groves near the village of Burin in the occupied West Bank last week, Israeli soldiers stopped them, telling them they weren’t allowed to harvest in that part of the valley, she said.
“This is our land. I came with my son alone, we came to harvest. If we cannot harvest our own olives from our lands, where should we go?” said Najjar.
In more violent incidents since the beginning of the harvest this month, armed Israeli settlers have assaulted Palestinian farmers, cut down trees and set fire to olive groves. The latest spate of attacks by settlers and blockages by the army is part of a trend that, rights groups say, is worsening as the Gaza war rages on, with settlers appearing emboldened by some far-right Israeli government ministers who seek to annex the West Bank.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment when asked by Reuters about accusations that soldiers bar olive farmers from accessing their land. The military says it tries to ensure Palestinians can harvest while avoiding clashes with settlers, and says the war in Gaza has raised tension in the West Bank, causing a security situation that is harder to manage.
Many Palestinians, as well as Israeli human rights groups, believe the army has abetted settler attacks.
“Since the start of the [Gaza] war, the army has prevented farmers access to their lands here. They say it’s a closed military zone and for security reasons. Now, when I pick olives from the trees in front of my house, it feels like I’m having to steal them,” said Musab Sufan, another Burin resident.
The Gaza Strip, a separate coastal territory around 100km from the landlocked West Bank, has been largely razed by Israel’s year-old war against Palestinian militant group Hamas. But the West Bank has in parallel suffered its worst violence for years.
Hundreds of Palestinians — including armed militants, stone-throwing youths and civilian bystanders — have been killed in clashes with Israeli security forces. Dozens of Israelis have also been killed in Palestinian street attacks over the past year.
The olive harvest, which runs roughly between September and November, has been caught up in that violence.
The UN says hundreds of olive trees have been burnt, vandalised or stolen by settlers this year since the start of the harvest. A group of Western states including France, Britain and Germany issued a joint statement on 14 October saying olive-picking had become “dangerous” due to settler violence and calling on Israel to allow Palestinians to join the harvest.
For Palestinians, olive trees represent a deep connection with their land, a crucial source of income and an important feature of their national cuisine.
Palestinian writers and poets like the famous Mahmoud Darwish have long infused their work with the symbolism of Palestinian olive trees. The harvest is a time for rural families, and sometimes visitors from urban centres, to work together on the land.
“This season is a bad one. They [settlers] have been burning trees already. It’s as if they’re implementing a scorched-earth policy to turn this land into a barren desert, to empty it of its inhabitants,” said Ibrahim Omaran, head of the Burin municipal council.
The right-wing cabinet of Netanyahu, which includes settlers who run parts of Israel’s security, finances and administration of occupied Palestinian territories, has recently presided over “unprecedented” land grabs of areas which Palestinians want for a future state, said the Israeli rights group Peace Now in a report this month.
Palestinians say they will not leave.
“My land is my identity. If I don’t have land, then what is my life for?” said Najjar. DM
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