It took almost twenty hours for the Israeli government to deplore, on Monday, May 27, the death of Palestinian civilians in the murderous bombardment, the day before, of a village of tents on the coast of Gaza. In a rare concession, faced with a wave of indignation abroad, the Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, deplored in the evening, in front of the Israeli parliament, a ” accident ” or a “tragic mistake”, using a Hebrew word which covers these two translations, and which in this case designates a faulty procedure. Meanwhile, only the office of the military prosecutor had expressed regrets for these civil dead.
Journalists affiliated with the Israeli radical right, staunch supporters of the prime minister, for their part aroused consternation by welcoming these strikes and the fire they caused, on the evening when Israel celebrated Lag B’Omer, the Jewish festival of bonfires. and the end of the mourning, conducive to wishes.
This tragedy was quickly followed by a worrying increase in tensions on the border with Egypt: on Monday, exchanges of fire between Israeli and Egyptian soldiers took place near the Rafah border post, closed since the army Control of its Palestinian part was assumed on May 6. An Egyptian soldier was killed. The two governments have commented little on the event, appearing to seek to minimize its significance.
According to the Gaza health ministry, the attack on the tent camp left 45 people dead and 249 injured. Such a toll is not exceptional in this war, even if the daily death toll has lost momentum since the spring. The army also regularly strikes populated areas in the Rafah region, including since the ground assault it has been carrying out there since May 6, in order to take control of the border between Gaza and Egypt. On Tuesday, these strikes continued in the center and west of the area.
Army denies hitting ‘safe zone’
However, the terrifying images of this fire, those of the headless body of a child carried by a crying man – including The world, banned from accessing the enclave like the entire international press, could not verify the authenticity – and those of displaced people burned by the melting plastic of their tents, caused a shock, at a time when Israel still claims to be carrying out a slow and cautious operation in Rafah.
In three weeks, the Jewish state accomplished the most massive forced population displacement of its war, after the depopulation of the northern half of the enclave at the end of 2023. The army expelled 1 million people from Rafah, for most families already repeatedly displaced from other temporary shelters. In the process, it shattered the fragile international aid architecture that had been based there over the months, endangering humanitarian distributions throughout the enclave.
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