SVE NEWS & FRANCE24.COM Sharing Series — Israeli forces launch ground assault of Khan Younis in south Gaza, hospitals overwhelmed

President Joe Biden on Tuesday forcefully denounced the reported rape and sexual violence against Israeli girls and women by Hamas militants following the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, calling on the world to condemn such conduct “without equivocation” and “without exception.”

Speaking at a campaign fundraiser in Boston, Biden noted that in recent weeks, female survivors and witnesses to the attacks have shared “horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty.”

“Reports of women raped — repeatedly raped — and their bodies being mutilated while still alive — of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them,” Biden said. “It is appalling.”

Israel has said it is investigating several cases of sexual assault and rape from the Hamas attack on Israel. Witnesses and medical experts have said that Hamas militants committed a series of rapes and other attacks before killing the victims in the Oct. 7 attack, though the extent of the sexual violence remains unknown.

Experts have been piecing together evidence in recent weeks in a case that is complicated because there are no known victims to testify and limited forensic evidence.

Biden’s comments come as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has sought to put greater focus on the sexual violence it says Hamas committed during the Oct. 7 attack that killed some 1,200 people on Israeli soil and led to another 240 being taken hostage. Some recently released hostages have shared testimonies of sexual violence and abuse during their time in Gaza.

Hamas has denied that militants committed sexual assaults.

US Vice President Kamala Harris will discuss the Biden administration’s efforts to increase the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas conflict with foreign leaders during a phone conversation on Monday, her office said.

The United States said Tuesday it would refuse visas for extremist Israeli settlers behind a wave of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, as it also asked Israel to do more to spare civilians in Gaza.

The visa measures amount to a rare concrete repercussion by the United States against Israelis in the nearly two-month-old war, in which President Joe Biden has nudged the US ally privately but also promised strong support.

“We have underscored to the Israeli government the need to do more to hold accountable extremist settlers who have committed violent attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.

“As President Biden has repeatedly said, those attacks are unacceptable,” he said.

Blinken said the United States would refuse entry to anyone involved in “undermining peace, security or stability in the West Bank” or who takes actions that “unduly restrict civilians’ access to essential services and basic necessities.”

Israel stopped firing in northern Gaza for several hours two days in a row to create safe passage for civilians to move to the south, a military spokesperson told CNN on Sunday, amid pressure for a humanitarian pause.

“Yesterday and today, for many hours with prior notice and warning, we facilitated, we stopped firing in certain areas of northern Gaza, which is the main combat area, and we called on Palestinians to move south,” Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus said.

Jordan’s King Abdullah said early on Monday in a post on X that Jordan’s air force personnel air-dropped at midnight an urgent medical aid to the Jordanian field hospital in Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu met families of returned hostages on Tuesday in an encounter that some of those present described as loud and angry. The meeting came as the fate of 138 captives who remained behind is still open, amid what the Israeli forces have called the most “intense” day of battles.

“I heard stories that broke my heart, I heard about the thirst and hunger, about physical and mental abuse,” Netanyahu said at a news conference. “I heard and you also heard, about sexual assault and cases of brutal rape unlike anything.”

Several of the relatives who attended the meeting left bitterly critical of the government. “It was a very turbulent meeting, many people yelling,” said Jennifer Master, whose partner Andrey is a hostage.

Dani Miran, whose son Omri was taken hostage on Oct. 7 by Hamas gunmen along with around 240 other Israelis and foreigners, said he felt his intelligence had been insulted by the meeting and had walked out in the middle of it.

“I won’t go into the details of what was discussed at the meeting but this entire performance was ugly, insulting, messy,” he told Israel’s Channel 13, saying the government had made a “farce” out of the issue. “They say ‘we’ve done this, we’ve done that.’ (Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya) Sinwar is the one who returned our people, not them. It angers me that they say that they dictated things. They hadn’t dictated a single move.”

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his disappointment about the breakdown of the

pause in fighting in Gaza in a call with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, his office said in a readout.

“The Prime Minister spoke to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this afternoon. He expressed disappointment about the breakdown of the pause in fighting in Gaza, which had allowed hostages to be released,” a Downing Street spokesperson said.

“The leaders discussed urgent efforts to ensure all remaining hostages are safely freed and to allow any remaining British nationals in Gaza to leave.”

The United States on Tuesday said Israel needed to do more to allow fuel and other aid into Gaza as its offensive against Hamas in the southern part of the enclave intensified.

“There is not enough being done right now,” US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told a news briefing. “The level of assistance that’s getting in is not sufficient. It needs to go up, and we’ve made that clear to the government of Israel,” Miller said.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant condemned violence against Palestinians by Jewish

settlers in the West Bank on Tuesday, saying that in a state of law, only the police and the military had the right to use force.

“There is, sadly, violence from extremists that we must condemn,” Gallant told a news conference.

At least 25 people were killed Tuesday in a strike that hit a southern Gaza school sheltering Palestinians displaced by war, the Hamas-run health ministry said.

Witnesses said dozens of injured people, as well as bodies recovered from under the rubble of Ma’an school in Khan Younis had been taken to the city’s Nasser hospital.

Many Palestinians have found refuge in schools or hospitals since the start of the Israeli offensive in October, believing they were relatively safe from attacks.

Hamas drugged hostages so they appeared “calm and happy” when released from captivity in Gaza, an Israeli official said on Tuesday after a one-week truce that saw scores freed collapsed.

Hagar Mizrahi, head of general medicine at Israel’s health ministry, told lawmakers that sedatives such as Rivotril, also known as Clonex, had been given to some of the hostages before their release last month.

“They (Hamas militants) gave them Clonex pills to make them seem calm and happy before they were handed over to the Red Cross,” Mizrahi told parliament’s health committee.

She did not specify whether the information was based on blood tests or witness accounts, or how many hostages she was referring to.

US aid chief Samantha Power arrived in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on Tuesday, where she announced more than $21 million in additional assistance for the Palestinian people affected by the conflict between Israel and Islamist group Hamas.

The USAID administrator arrived in Al Arish with a delivery of 36,000 pounds of food assistance and medical supplies airlifted by the Department of Defense from Jordan and intended for Gaza, according to a statement.

The additional assistance Power announced on Tuesday will support the provision of hygiene and shelter supplies, food and other assistance for residents of Gaza and the West Bank affected by the conflict, according to a separate statement.

The funds will also support psychosocial care and critical health services along with the establishment of a NGO-operated field hospital in Gaza that will provide in-patient care.

Hamas’s armed wing, the al Qassam Brigades, said its fighters had destroyed or damaged 24 Israeli military vehicles, and that snipers had killed or wounded eight Israeli soldiers in ongoing clashes in various areas of Khan Younis.

Separately, Gaza health officials said many people were killed in an Israeli strike on houses in Deir al-Balah, north of Khan Younis. Dr Eyad Al-Jabri, head of the Shuhada Al-Aqsa Hospital there, told Reuters at least 45 were killed.

These figures could not be confirmed, as the area could not be reached.

There will be no negotiations or exchange of detainees until Israel’s aggression against the Gaza strip stops, Hamas official Osama Hamdan said in a press conference on Tuesday.

“We hold (Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin) Netanyahu fully responsible for the lives of the Israeli hostages and for obstructing the completion of the exchange deal,” he added.

The Israeli army said on Tuesday that 82 soldiers had been killed since the start of its offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The army on Tuesday afternoon gave a toll of 80 soldiers killed, following the deaths on Monday of five troops. Later on Tuesday a statement announced two more had been killed inside Gaza.

After weeks of heavy bombing, Israel launched a ground offensive in the territory on October 27 aimed at destroying Hamas in retaliation for an attack that Israeli officials say killed around 1,200 people, most of them civilians.

The United States said Tuesday it would refuse visas for extremist Israeli settlers who attack Palestinians, stepping up pressure to curb a wave of violence in the West Bank during the Gaza war. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the United States would refuse entry to anyone involved in “undermining peace, security or stability in the West Bank” or who takes actions that “unduly restrict civilians’ access to essential services and basic necessities”.

The restrictions will target those who have committed acts of violence or taken other actions that restrict civilians’ access to essential services and basic necessities and may also apply to those individuals’ family members, Blinken said.

Earlier, the US State Department said that steps taken by the Israeli government to address extremist settler violence in the West Bank are not sufficient. A State Department spokesperson told reporters the United States thinks the Israeli government should prosecute Israeli settlers who engage in violent activities against Palestinians.

The Israel-Hamas war has killed at least 16,248 people in the Gaza Strip, the Hamas government media office said Tuesday, revising up an earlier toll provided by the health ministry.

In nearly two months of fighting sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, more than 7,000 children and nearly 5,000 women have been killed in Gaza, the media office said in a statement.