U.S. Official in Al-Quds to Greenlight Rafah Invasion

Date: 19 May 2024 - 22:48

News ID: ۱۲۷۵۲۰

CAIRO/AL-QUDs (Dispatches) -- Israeli planes and tanks pounded areas across the Gaza Strip, residents said, as White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan met Zionist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday amid the occupying regime’s expanding invasion of Rafah.
Sullivan was expected to press for Israel to go after Hamas fighters in a targeted way, not with a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, the White House said before the discussions.
The occupying regime of Israel has been pushing into the city, forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee the area that was one of their few remaining places of refuge.
“Across the Gaza Strip, there is no safety,” said Majid Omran who told Reuters his family had fled Rafah and just returned to what was left of their home in the southern city of Khan Younis that they had fled nearly five months ago.
“We took our children, grandchildren, and daughters and we came and lived above the rubble of our home. Because there is no place to take refuge here,” Omran told Reuters inside the wrecked property as a woman cooked over a fire.
Zionist forces also pushed deeper into the narrow alleyways of Jabalia in northern Gaza overnight and into Sunday, returning to an area that they said they had cleared earlier in the conflict, residents said.
The Zionist military has said its operations in Jabalia - the largest of Gaza’s eight historic refugee camps - are precise, but an airstrike around dawn on Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza martyred
at least 31 people, according to Wafa news agency. Several others were wounded.
Ahead of Sunday’s talks, an Israeli official said prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his senior aides would try to reach agreement with Sullivan about the need for press ahead with the Rafah push.
The Gaza Civil Emergency Service said in a statement rescue teams have so far recovered the bodies of 150 Palestinians killed by Zionist troops in recent days, and that 300 houses had been struck by Israeli aerial and ground fire.
At least 35,386 Palestinians have been martyred in Israeli strikes since Oct. 7, according to the enclave’s health ministry. Aid agencies have warned of widespread hunger and shortages of fuel and medical supplies.
The U.S. military said on Friday trucks had started moving aid ashore from a temporary pier built by its forces, the first to reach the besieged enclave by sea in weeks.
The Popular Resistance Committee (PRC), an armed group that fights alongside Hamas in Gaza, released a statement saying the pier had been built to ease political pressure on Israel, and that any Israeli or U.S. troops on its territory would be considered a legitimate target.
On Saturday, Hamas also raised concerns about the pier and warned against any foreign military force in Gaza.