Mourners carry the body of a 40-year-old Palestinian killed in an attack by Israeli settlers during his funeral near Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on August 27. | Photo credit: Reuters
Israel said it killed three Hamas militants in an airstrike in the occupied West Bank on Friday (August 30, 2024), bringing the death toll to at least 19 in a large-scale military operation now in its third day.
A senior UN aid official, meanwhile, wondered “what has become of our basic humanity” as the war in Gaza rages on and humanitarian operations struggle to respond.
The United Nations has warned that the military operation Israel launched early on Wednesday (28 August 2024) in the West Bank is fueling “an already explosive situation” in the area and has put pressure on Israel to end it.
In the United States, Vice President Kamala Harris has pledged not to change Washington’s policy of supplying weapons to Israel if elected to the top job in November. But she insisted it was time to “end this war.”
Israel has described its attacks on towns and refugee camps in the northern West Bank as “counter-terrorism operations.”
They have killed at least 19 Palestinians since Wednesday (28 August 2024), the army and the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
The army said it killed three Hamas militants in an airstrike near the northern city of Jenin on Friday (August 30, 2024).
Witnesses told media that the strike hit a car in the town of Zababdeh, southeast of the city.
Israeli forces withdrew from other West Bank cities late Thursday (August 29, 2024), but fighting continued around Jenin, long a center of militant activity.
Loud explosions have been reported from the city’s refugee camp and thick plumes of smoke can be seen rising from the area.
Vaccination ‘pauses’
The World Health Organization said Israel had agreed to at least three days of “humanitarian pauses” in parts of Gaza, starting on Sunday (September 1, 2024) to facilitate a vaccination campaign after the first case of polio in a quarter century was recorded . on the territory.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the measures were “not a ceasefire” in the nearly 11-month war sparked by Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.
In the West Bank, the army said it had killed seven militants on Thursday (August 29, 2024), including five militants in the Tulkarem refugee camp.
A military statement said one of the five was Muhammad Jaber, also known as Abu Shujaa, who the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad said was the commander at the nearby Nur Shams refugee camp.
The Palestinian Prisoners Club advocacy group said at least 45 people have been detained in the West Bank as of Wednesday (28 August 2024). An Israeli military spokesman said that “ten wanted persons have been arrested.”
‘Basic sense of humanity’
In Gaza, the Israeli army said on Thursday (29 August 2024) that it had eliminated “dozens” of militants in a day of fighting and strikes.
Two people were killed in Israeli shelling in the Jabalia refugee camp on Friday, August 30, 2024, the civil protection agency in the Hamas-ruled area said.
The UN had to halt the movement of aid workers within Gaza on Monday (26 August 2024) due to a new Israeli evacuation order for the Deir el-Balah area, which had become a hub for its workers.
“More than 88% of Gaza’s territory has been under (Israeli) evacuation orders at some point,” said the acting head of the UN’s humanitarian office, Joyce Msuya.
She said civilians were forced into only 11 percent of the Gaza Strip, which was already one of the most densely populated areas in the world before the war.
“What we have seen over the past 11 months calls into question the world’s commitment to the international legal order designed to prevent these tragedies,” Msuya said.
“It forces us to ask: What has become of our basic sense of humanity?”
