GAZA: Israel continued to pound Gaza with heavy airstrikes on Thursday as a top White House advisor was due to arrive in Jerusalem with a rift growing over US calls for its ally to exercise restraint.
The conflict, now in its third month, began after the October 7 attacks on Israel by the Palestinian resistance group Hamas. It has left besieged Gaza in ruins and killed more than 18,600 people, mostly women and children.
The Gaza health ministry said Israeli air strikes early Thursday had killed at least 19 people across the Gaza Strip.
In the West Bank, which has also seen a surge in violence since October 7, the Palestinian Authority said two people were killed in Israeli strikes in the city of Jenin.
US President Joe Biden, whose government has provided Israel with billions of dollars of military aid, on Wednesday gave his sharpest rebuke of the war yet, saying Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza was weakening international support.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doubled down on his offensive, vowing “we are going until the end, until victory, nothing less than that”.
And Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said the war against Hamas would continue “with or without international support”.
On Thursday, Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was due to arrive in Jerusalem for talks with Netanyahu and his war cabinet.
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Sullivan told a Wall Street Journal event ahead of his trip he would discuss a timetable to end the war and urge Israeli leaders “to move to a different phase from the kind of high-intensity operations that we see today”.
Sullivan will have “extremely serious conversations” in Israel, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday.
Netanyahu has said there is also “disagreement” with Washington over how a post-conflict Gaza would be governed.
Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh said on Wednesday “any arrangement in Gaza or in the Palestinian cause without Hamas or the resistance factions is a delusion”.
He said Hamas was ready for talks that could lead to a “political path that secures the right of the Palestinian people to their independent state with Jerusalem as its capital”.
A poll published on Wednesday by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research showed Haniyeh had the support of 78 percent of people in the Palestinian territories, compared with 58 percent before the war.
International pressure is mounting on Israel to better protect civilians, with the UN General Assembly this week overwhelmingly backing a non-binding resolution for a ceasefire.
While Washington voted against, the resolution was supported by allies Australia, Canada and New Zealand, who, in a rare joint statement, said they were “alarmed at the diminishing safe space for civilians in Gaza”.
CNN reported on Wednesday citing US intelligence that nearly half of the air-to-ground munitions used by Israel in Gaza since October 7 have been unguided, which can pose a greater threat to civilians.
