Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said Monday the Israeli government had yet to take a position that would allow the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip to re-open.
The Rafah crossing is the only non-Israeli-controlled point out of Gaza. It was expected to re-open on Monday to allow the outflow of foreign national Palestinians and to allow the badly needed humanitarian aid in, but all sides have denied there were any truce conditions in place for that to happen early this morning.
“Until now, unfortunately, the Israeli government has not taken a position that would lead to the possibility of opening the crossing from the Gaza side to allow the entry of aid or the exit of citizens from other countries,” Shoukry said. “We and all the Egyptian agencies are fully prepared to bring in aid and the exit of citizens of different countries, and also to operate the crossing at its normal pace.”
Health officials are using ice cream trucks to store the bodies of dead Palestinians because there is not enough space at a hospital morgue in the central Gazan town of Deir Al-Balah.
“It’s not as you see,” local journalist Motaz Azaiza said in a video posted on Instagram Sunday as he filmed a freezer truck advertising ice cream. “It’s ice cream trucks for bodies.”
He said the trucks were being used because there was “no space” inside the hospital to store the corpses.
“They keep it cold until they can give [the bodies] to their families,” he said.
In another video shared by Azaiza, bodies wrapped in bloodied sheets could be seen inside the truck.
“The hospital morgue can only take 10 bodies, so we have brought in ice cream freezers from the ice cream factories in order to store the huge numbers of martyrs,” Dr. Yasser Ali from Shuhada Al-Aqsa Hospital also told Reuters.
Gaza’s health ministry said Monday that 2,750 people in the enclave had been killed over the past week.
A 6-year-old boy was stabbed to death and his mother was critically wounded by their landlord in an alleged anti-Muslim hate crime, the Will County Sheriff’s Office said Sunday, calling it a “senseless and cowardly act of violence.”
“Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis,” the sheriff’s office said in a news release.“The child’s Palestinian Muslim family came to America seeking what we all seek—a refuge to live, learn, and pray in peace,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “This horrific act of hate has no place in America.”
Hamas has said it will trade the captives for thousands of Palestinians held by Israel in the kind of lopsided exchange deals that have been reached in the past.
Iran has warned it could enter the war as well if Israel launches a widely anticipated ground offensive in the Gaza Strip in the coming days. Already, the Lebanese Shiite militia group Hezbollah, which is also sponsored by Iran, has launched missiles into Israel, though it insists that represents a “warning” for Israel rather than its full entry into the war.
“We heard from the resistance that they have no problem to continue resisting,” Kanaani said, referring to Hamas. “They said the resistance holds military capability to continue resisting in the field for a long time.”
