September 6,
2024
Israeli troops
withdrew from the occupied West Bank cities of Jenin and Tulkarem early on 6
September after 10 days of brutal raids that resulted in dozens of casualties
and decimated infrastructure.
Eyewitnesses
told Anadolu Agency (AA) that the Israeli army pulled out of Tulkarem and its
camp a few hours after withdrawing from Jenin.
The Israeli army
inflicted significant damage on infrastructure and homes in Tulkarem, the
eyewitnesses said.
Hours earlier,
Israeli forces “withdrew from the city of Jenin and its refugee camp after ten
days of military aggression,” WAFA news agency reported.
Witnesses in
Jenin have expressed fear of an imminent return of Israeli forces to the city.
“Military checkpoints surrounding Jenin remain active, heightening fears of
further incursions,” WAFA reported.
“The occupation
evacuated its sniper teams and soldiers from residential buildings around and
inside the camp and redeployed its vehicles at the military checkpoints
surrounding the city,” Al Jazeera’s correspondent reported.
Images and
videos on social media show the extent of the damage Israel’s military
inflicted on Jenin, including roads completely torn up by bulldozers. Several
shops have been damaged, and Jenin’s Cinema Roundabout area was destroyed.
Water and sewage
networks were dug up and damaged, and electricity poles were uprooted from the
streets, witnesses told AA.
Israeli troops
reentered the city of Tulkarem on Thursday following a withdrawal at dawn,
besieging a hospital and reinvading the city’s camp. The army had withdrawn
briefly on 29 August after assassinating the city’s Quds Brigades commander,
Abu Shujaa.
The army then
pushed back heavily into Tulkarem earlier this week. Attacks on Jenin, on the
other hand, witnessed little pause since Israel launched its assault on the
West Bank on 28 August.
Before
withdrawing, Israeli forces cut off electricity to several areas of Jenin and
its camp by destroying power lines in several neighborhoods.
Resistance
fighters continued to confront troops in Jenin and Tulkarem ahead of the
withdrawal.
“In a
pre-planned ambush, our fighters in the engineering unit were able to detonate
two explosive devices in a military jeep in the Hamama axis, achieving
confirmed casualties,” the Quds Brigades’ Jenin branch said in a statement.
Meanwhile,
clashes continued in other areas of the West Bank, including Nablus’ Balata
refugee camp.
Israel’s
operation in the West Bank began on 28 August and has since killed 36
Palestinians and injured dozens.
It is expected
to resume and continue with intensity for some time. Security officials told
Israel Hayom this week that the Israeli army has internally classified the
occupied West Bank as “the second most critical front, immediately after Gaza.”
Raids in the
northern West Bank are “set to continue in the foreseeable future,” the
security officials said.
Israeli forces shot and killed a
female international activist during an anti-occupation protest in the town of
Beita near Nablus in the West Bank, WAFA news agency reported on 6 August.
Twenty-six-year-old Aysenur Ezgi
Eygi, a US citizen of Turkish descent, died on Friday after being shot in the
head with live ammunition by Israeli forces in Beita, a town located south of
Nablus in the occupied West Bank.
Eygi was participating alongside
local Palestinians in the weekly protest against settlement expansion.
WAFA added that the activist was
rushed to Rafidia Hospital in Nablus and placed in the intensive care unit in
an effort to save her life.
“We tried to perform a resuscitation
operation on her, but unfortunately she died,” Rafidia Hospital Director Fouad
Nafaa told Reuters.
There was no immediate comment from
the US embassy.
Local sources told WAFA that the
confrontation erupted when Israeli forces violently suppressed the Friday
protest, firing live ammunition, stun grenades, and tear gas at demonstrators.
An 18-year-old Palestinian was also injured by Israeli forces when shrapnel
struck her in the thigh.
Eygi was a volunteer for the
International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and was involved with the Faz’a
campaign, which works to support and protect Palestinian farmers from Israeli
military and settler violence.
Ezgi is the third ISM volunteer to
be killed by the Israeli forces in occupied Palestine. Rachel Corrie was killed
in Gaza’s Rafah in 2003 after an Israeli soldier crushed her with a bulldozer.
Tom Hurndall was killed in Gaza in 2004 by an Israeli sniper. An Israeli
soldier shot Brian Avery in the face in Jenin in 2003. He survived the attack
but was permanently maimed. The bullet ripped through his cheek and smashed his
eye socket and jaw bones.
The Israeli army’s killing of Eygi
comes amid a broader increase in settler attacks against Palestinians in the
West Bank. The settler movement seeks to expel Palestinians from their land to
pave the way for Jewish settlement.
Earlier this month, more than 70
armed Jewish settlers invaded the Palestinian town of Jit in the occupied West
Bank, firing bullets and tear gas at residents and setting several homes and
cars and other property on fire.
Settlers killed 23-year-old Rashid
Sedda during the pogrom. The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Health
confirmed the young Palestinian died due to a gunshot wound to the chest.
“We have attacks but nothing to this
level,” the head of Jit’s village council, Nasser Sedda, told CNN. “We haven’t
seen anything like this before, and without a prior warning. They caught the
people off guard – women, children, and elders were there.”
“Dozens of Israeli civilians, some
of them masked, entered the town of Jit and set fire to vehicles and structures
in the area, hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails,” the Israeli military said in
a statement.
Hezbollah
carried out several attacks against Israeli sites on 6 September, as Israel
targeted the south of Lebanon with illegal white phosphorus shells.
“The Mujahideen
of the Islamic Resistance targeted, at 12:15 pm on Friday 6-9-2024, the
espionage equipment at the Metulla site with appropriate weapons and hit it
directly,” Hezbollah said in a statement, marking its fifth operation of the
day.
Hezbollah also
fired rockets at the Ruwaisat al-Qarn site and “hit it directly,” it said.
The Lebanese
resistance responded to recent Israeli attacks on southern Lebanese villages by
targeting “buildings used by enemy soldiers in the Metulla settlement.”
Significant
damage was inflicted on the building in Metulla, and a large fire broke out in
it. Israeli firefighters were deployed to the scene.
Hezbollah also
targeted the Zabdin barracks with rockets, according to its media page.
According to
Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA), Israel targeted southern Lebanon with
white phosphorus on Friday. “The area between Tal Nahas and Al-Hamams towards
the Marjayoun plain is being subjected to artillery shelling with phosphorus
shells, which caused fires to break out,” NNA said.
Israeli jets
also struck a home in the town of Al-Dahaira on Friday.
Hezbollah had
targeted Israel’s Mayaan Baruch military site with a suicide drone that
morning.
Israeli threats
against Lebanon have escalated once again. The Israeli military said on 6
September that its Yiftah Brigade carried out drills this week simulating a
ground invasion of Lebanon, moving along a “mountainous route” and “complex
terrain.”
On 5 September,
Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for an escalation against
Lebanon.
“We are now
paying the price for 30 years of a false perception, of not being prepared to
pay the price of war, and therefore we made the monsters of terror in Gaza and
Lebanon grow stronger … the war must end only when Hamas and Hezbollah are
absent,” Smotrich said.
“There will be a
war [with Lebanon], there is no choice. It will have prices and it will be
complex. After thirty years it is time to change,” he added.
On 25 August,
Hezbollah retaliated to the killing of its top commander, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut
in late July, which also killed several civilians, including children.
Hezbollah
targeted two military and intelligence sites just miles north of Tel Aviv with
drones, coinciding with hundreds of rockets fired at sites in the Golan Heights
and Galilee – aimed at distracting and overwhelming the Iron Dome system.
One of the main
targets near Tel Aviv was the headquarters of Israel’s Unit 8200. Tel Aviv’s
claim that the attack was thwarted preemptively was rejected as a “Hollywood”
narrative by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Strict Israeli army censorship
over the incident is still in place.
The majority of the victims of
Israel’s war on Gaza have been women and children, according to data released
by the strip’s Government Media Office on 5 September.
The data reveals that “69 percent of
the victims are children and women.” The number of dead children alone stands
at 16,715, while the number of women killed stands at 11,308.
Marking “335 days of the genocide,”
the media office highlighted that 3,556 massacres have been committed by the
Israeli army against Palestinians in Gaza since the start of the war.
The overall death toll now stands at
40,878, while another 10,000 are missing, either still under the rubble or in
Israeli detention.
The media office statement adds that
nearly 1,000 medical workers and civil defense workers have been killed by
Israeli forces. The number of journalists killed is now 172.
Additionally, seven mass graves have
been found inside hospitals in the Gaza Strip.
Over 170 displacement shelters have
been bombed, and 200 government buildings and 123 schools and universities have
been destroyed.
At least 280,000 housing units have
been targeted or destroyed by the Israeli army. Over 80,000 tons of explosives
have been dropped on the besieged strip.
The media offices added that two
million Palestinians have been displaced.
Over 30 Palestinians have starved to
death, according to the statement.
The data came out shortly after UN
spokesman Stephane Dujarric warned that the “humanitarian situation in Gaza
remains beyond catastrophic.” He added that there has been a 35 percent
decrease in cooked meals provided to those in need.
“This is in part attributed to the
multiple evacuation orders that were issued by the Israeli security forces,
with at least 70 kitchens forced to either suspend cooked meals provision or
relocate.”
He also said over one million
Palestinians in central and southern Gaza did not receive any food rations in
August.
At least a dozen Palestinians were
killed by Israel across Gaza on 6 September, including in Rafah and Gaza City’s
Al-Zaytoun neighborhood.
“Civil defense teams also recovered
bodies from the rubble of a house in the Sabra neighborhood, south of Gaza
City, and efforts were underway to locate additional missing individuals,” WAFA
news agency reported.
Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that a Gaza ceasefire and prisoner exchange
deal between Israel and Hamas is not imminent, contradicting statements from
the White House claiming the opposite, CNN reported on 6 September.
“There’s not a
deal in the making,” Netanyahu told Fox News. “Unfortunately, it’s not close.”
On Sunday, US
President Joe Biden said that the parties were on the verge of a deal. On
Wednesday, a senior administration official claimed 90 percent of the agreement
had been completed.
“It’s exactly
inaccurate. There’s a story, a narrative out there, that there’s a deal out
there,” the Israeli premier said in response to the US claim.
Asked about
Netanyahu’s comments, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said,
“I’m just not going to get into a public back and forth through all of you in
the press with Prime Minister Netanyahu.”
“I will just say
that this process has, at times, been cumbersome. We have faced setbacks and
setbacks and more setbacks, and without question, we here in the administration
are frustrated that we still haven’t been able to conclude this deal,” he said.
CNN noted, “US
officials have been reticent to directly criticize Netanyahu – even as he has
repeatedly broken with the administration’s position and cast doubt on his
adherence to a potential deal.”
With no deal
between Israel and Hamas in site, the families of soldiers who are dual
Israeli-US citizens being held by Hamas have pressed the White House to
seriously consider cutting a unilateral deal with the Palestinian resistance
movement to win their release. The option is currently under discussion among
White House officials, according to five people familiar with the discussions
speaking with NBC News.
There are four
remaining US citizens being held by Hamas that the US believes are alive, and
three others believed to be dead.
The White House
has begun compiling a list of prisoners in the US whose release could be of
interest to Hamas as part of securing a deal to free US-Israeli captives,
according to four current and former officials. One official said there were
five people on the list.
Sources speaking
to Asharq newspaper stated that Netanyahu had prevented a direct deal between
Hamas and the US regarding the captives.
As the US
presidential elections near, both candidates have argued over who supports
Israel and the Jewish lobby in the US more strongly.
Republican
presidential candidate Donald Trump told the Republican Jewish Coalition’s
annual conference on 5 September that Israel will cease to exist if Democratic
presidential nominee Kamala Harris wins the 2024 election.
“If Kamala
Harris wins, terrorist armies will wage an unceasing war to drive Jews out of
the Holy Land. I can say honestly that we got 25 percent of the vote, 26
percent after four years after I’ve done more for Israel than anyone. This year
we will probably be around a 50% mark,” Trump said.
“I have to ask:
who are these 50 percent? These are people who hate Israel and don’t like the
Jewish people ... I think you have to explain that to your people because they
don’t know. They have no idea what they’re getting into if she becomes
president. Israel will no longer exist.”
Earlier this
week, Harris reiterated her support for Israel while repeating Israel’s false
claims about 7 October.
“From its
massacre of 1,200 people to sexual violence, taking of hostages, and these
murders, Hamas’ depravity is evident and horrifying,” Harris said.
“The threat
Hamas poses to the people of Israel – and American citizens in Israel – must be
eliminated, and Hamas cannot control Gaza.”
In her only
interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris reiterated her support
for Israel and refused to say that aid to Tel Aviv should be conditioned
despite Israel’s ongoing killing of women and children in Gaza on a mass scale.
Halie Soifer,
chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, noted that as a
senator, Harris regularly voted for military aid to Israel and supported the
additional aid for Israel passed in a national security package that included
support for Ukraine and Taiwan.
Washington has warned Tel Aviv that
US naval forces cannot indefinitely be deployed to the West Asia region to
protect Israel, Channel 13 reported on 6 September, amid continued fear of an
expanded war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The Israeli news channel reported a
message was sent to Israel that tensions with Hezbollah and Iran need to be
reduced at some stage because “the [US] aircraft carriers will not be able to
stay in the area forever.”
Fear of a full-scale regional war
spiked after Israel assassinated top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut
and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in late July.
Hezbollah retaliated against the
assassination in part by launching a large-scale missile and drone attack on
targets in northern Israel on 25 August.
The next day, the US Department of
Defense said the deployment of two US aircraft carrier strike groups in West
Asia had been extended.
In announcing the decision, US
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin emphasized the steadfast commitment of the US
to supporting Israel against threats from Iran and Hezbollah.
The Theodore Roosevelt carrier had
arrived in the region in early July, while carrier Abraham Lincoln arrived in
mid-August.
The Theodore Roosevelt replaced the
Dwight D Eisenhower carrier after its deployment to the region was extended
repeatedly earlier this summer.
Iran has yet to retaliate for the
assassination of Hamas official Haniyeh in Tehran amid ongoing negotiations
between Israel and Hamas for a Gaza ceasefire and prisoner exchange.
Negotiations continue to stall due
to efforts by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to block a ceasefire
deal. Netanyahu continues to insist that Israeli troops keep a long-term
occupation of the Philadelphi corridor on the Gaza–Egypt border and a right to
continue the war after a prisoner swap.
On Friday, the Financial Times (FT)
reported that the US military is preparing for the possible collapse of the
talks.
General CQ Brown, chair of the US
Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated that “[I] think about … [if] the talks stall or
completely stop, how that impacts the tension in the region and the things we
need to do to be prepared should that change.”
General Brown said he is weighing
how regional actors would respond to the failure of the talks “and whether they
increase any type of their activity, which potentially goes down a path of
miscalculation and causes … the conflict to broaden.”
With no deal between Israel and
Hamas in sight, the families of soldiers with dual Israeli-US citizenship being
held by Hamas have pressed the White House to seriously consider cutting a
unilateral deal with the Palestinian resistance movement to win their release.
The option is currently under discussion among White House officials, according
to five people familiar with the talks speaking with NBC News.
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