Former Dutch Deputy Prime Minister and Middle East expert Sigrid Kag has been appointed as the United Nations (UN) coordinator for humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres announced.
The Security Council earlier adopted a resolution asking Guterres to appoint a senior coordinator for humanitarian aid and reconstruction of the Gaza Strip.
Guterres said Kag, who speaks Arabic and five other languages, "brings a wealth of experience in political, humanitarian and development issues, as well as in diplomacy."
Kag, as reported by Radio Free Europe, will probably start working on January 8.
"It will facilitate, coordinate, monitor and verify humanitarian aid shipments to Gaza," Guterres said.
He added that the KAG will establish a UN mechanism to speed up the delivery of aid through states that are not parties to the conflict.
There is a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, due to the war between Hamas and Israel, as well as insufficient deliveries of aid to the Palestinian territory.
(MINE)
The Chief of the General Staff of Israel, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, announced this evening that the army is expanding its operations in the southern and central part of the Gaza Strip, and that it has destroyed almost all Hamas battalions in the north.
However, Halevi warned that the war will last for months, because war goals are not easy to achieve and the battles are being fought on "complex territory".
"I just arrived from the Gaza Strip. I met with the soldiers in the north of the Strip. I was impressed with how the forces are fighting, working and achieving the goals we set for them. The IDF is close to destroying the Hamas battalions in the north of the Gaza Strip," Halevi said on press conference in southern Israel.
He added that "many terrorists and commanders have been eliminated", that some have surrendered and that there are hundreds of prisoners, and that many underground infrastructures and weapons have been destroyed.
"In an urban area where terrorists are dressed as civilians, it cannot be said that we killed them all. We will continue to encounter fighters in that area and we will continue to attack them, to pursue them in various ways," said the head of the IDF defense forces) about the fighting in northern Gaza.
It is expected that the fighting will no longer be fierce and Halevi announced that "efforts will be concentrated in the south of the Gaza Strip, Khan Yunis" and the camps in the central part, Israeli media reported.
"We will not allow a return to the security reality before October 7 and we will not allow it to happen again," Israel's chief of staff said, referring to the unprecedented attack on southern Israel that killed more than 1.200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 240 hostages. in Gaza.
Then, in the Israeli bombardment and the subsequent ground offensive, more than 20.900 Palestinians died, two-thirds of them women and children.
Halevi also announced that airstrikes will continue without interruption and that buildings are demolished when they are "an enemy target, when they pose a danger to Israeli forces."
"The IDF is focused and precise in its operations," he said.
(BETA)
The Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, which is ruled by Hamas, announced today that 20.915 people have been killed in Israeli military operations since the beginning of the war.
The balance of victims includes 241 people killed in the past 24 hours, the ministry stated.
It was also said that 7 Palestinians were wounded in the war that began on October 54.918, Agence France-Presse reported.
In Israel, the most people, more than 1.200, were killed on the first day of the war in cross-border attacks by Palestinian extremists, led by the Islamic Hamas, on southern Israeli territory.
On the same day, about 240 hostages were taken to Gaza.
About 300 members of the Israeli security forces were killed then, and 158 soldiers were killed in the ground operations, which began after ten days of bombardment of the Palestinian enclave.
(BETA)
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant said today that Israel is being attacked from seven different fronts while the war in the Gaza Strip continues.
"We are at war on multiple fronts. They are attacking us from seven different sides - from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Iraq, Yemen and Iran," Galant said at a session of the parliamentary committee for foreign affairs and defense.
He said the Israeli army had responded to six so far, but did not say which fronts.
"We have already responded and acted in six of those areas and I say here in the clearest way that anyone who acts against us is a potential target, there is no immunity for anyone," the Israeli minister added.
He announced that the war in Gaza will be "long and difficult", and that it has "a high price, but its justification is the highest it can be", reported the Israeli media.
"If we don't meet the goals of the war, we will find ourselves in a situation where people will not want to live in a place where we don't know how to protect them," Galant said of the residents who were evacuated from the area near the border in the south with Gaza and in the north with Lebanon.
The Minister of Defense explained that "determination, endurance, strength and national cohesion" are needed to achieve those goals.
"It is a battle of national determination and I tell you, we will defeat Hamas," Galant said.
At the same meeting, committee chairman Juli Edelstein said that as the fight progresses, "Israel is moving from a second to a third military operation" in Gaza, but also warned that the public should prepare for a protracted war.
Israel, meanwhile, is apparently preparing to expand its ground offensive to a third, central part of the Gaza Strip.
Refugee camps were bombed there today, residents said, AP reported.
(BETA)
The Israeli army announced a short suspension of military activities for what it said were humanitarian purposes in two settlements in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.
The break will reportedly last for four hours and has already started at 10am local time.
(Radio Free Europe)
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said that Israel shelled their headquarters in Khan Yunis, a city in the southern Gaza Strip.
In a post on the social network X, the Red Crescent stated that several people were injured in the Israeli attack.
(Radio Free Europe)
Israeli forces hit more than 100 Hamas targets in the southern Gaza Strip overnight, the IDF claimed.
The IDF points out that the targets were tunnel shafts, military locations, as well as other Hamas infrastructure.
They also note that they are ready to expand the ground offensive to the south, although fighting is still taking place in the northern part of the Belt.
(Radio Free Europe)
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said two more soldiers were killed in fighting in southern Gaza yesterday, bringing the death toll since the start of the ground offensive to 158.
The IDF says four more soldiers have been injured in the past 24 hours.
(Radio Free Europe)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the intensification of the fight against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, with the assessment that peace will only be achieved if Gaza is "demilitarized" and "deradicalized."
Despite international calls for a truce, there is no end in sight to the fighting after more than two months of war against the Palestinian Islamist movement, which launched an unprecedented attack on October 7.
"We are not stopping... we are intensifying the fighting in the coming days. It will be a long war," said the Israeli prime minister last night, after visiting Gaza.
In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu listed three "preconditions" for achieving peace.
"Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized and Palestinian society must be deradicalized," the prime minister said.
Netanyahu also said he was ready to support the voluntary migration of Palestinians from Gaza.
"Our problem is not whether to approve the exit, but whether there will be countries that will be ready to 'absorb' that exit," Netanyahu said before members of his Likud party, reports Haaretz.
Hamas condemned the "absurd project" of Israel.
Palestinians "refuse to be deported and displaced. There can be no exile and there is no other choice but to stay on our land," Hamas said in a statement.
According to Hamas, 20.674 people have been killed in Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war on October 7.
After the attack by Hamas, in which 1.140 people, mostly civilians, were killed, Israel announced that it had two goals, to destroy Hamas and free 129 hostages held by the extremists in Gaza.
(Beta)
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