Take a long look at this photo. Now picture this as Chicago.
Imagine that you're given 48 hours to vacate the Windy City and 50% of the buildings are subsequently destroyed (estimates by the UN not disputed by Israel). The whole place looks like this and you've been herded into some makeshift camp in Peoria. Oops, not that's not right...in an empty field on I55 with little or no electricity, water or housing (a few tents being brought in). Now the the same guys that leveled Chicago after telling you to hide in this field are coming again to do much of the same.
Sound like fun or something you'll soon forgive or forget?
Pressure Builds for Gaza Cease-Fire
Israel presses campaign throughout enclave, U.S. vetoes U.N. resolution
By Isabel Coles, David S. Cloud and Dion Nissenbaum, WSJ
Updated Dec. 8, 2023 6:35 pm ET
Israel’s accelerating campaign to destroy Hamas is driving up civilian casualties and deepening a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, raising pressure on the Israeli government to bring an end to the war.
Intensifying airstrikes and close-quarters fighting in both north and south Gaza have all but blocked the flow of aid and created what has been described as a breakdown in civil order. “Society is on the brink of collapse,” Thomas White of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, wrote on X, the former Twitter.
While the international community steps up calls for an end to the fighting, Israel is racing to achieve its stated military aims of removing Hamas from power and killing its leaders. The rush to achieve its goals is causing even greater devastation in the enclave where most of the population has been displaced and thousands killed.
On Friday, the United Nations Security Council debated a resolution proposed by the United Arab Emirates that would demand an immediate cease-fire. The U.S. vetoed the resolution, arguing it was imbalanced and didn’t include language condemning Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
“Although the United States strongly supports a durable peace in which both Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and security, we do not support this resolution’s call for an unsustainable cease-fire that will only plant the seeds for the next war,” Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Robert Wood said.
Israeli leaders have said they won’t end the war until they destroy Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, but former security officials say that besides international pressure, there are economic pressures at home and calls for releasing the hostages that set time constraints on this phase of the war.
Israel called up nearly 400,000 reservists for battle in both Gaza and on Israel’s border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah has been exchanging blows with the Israeli military. Tens of thousands of people have fled Israel’s northern and southern borders.
That level of mobilization and displacement is taking a toll on the economy and public opinion in a country of nine million people. The families of hostages have stepped up calls for the government to give priority to freeing the remaining captives, believed to be held in underground tunnels in Khan Younis, the southern Gaza city hometown of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and a major theater of battle.
“The most intense targeting usually takes place during these periods when undeclared deadlines have been set,” said Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and director of the Washington think tank’s Conflict Resolution and Track II Dialogues Program.
The Israeli military said Friday morning it had struck 450 targets over the previous 24 hours in what it described as extensive battles in Khan Younis and other parts of Gaza. The attacks included airstrikes, artillery barrages and naval gunfire, it said.
The Israeli military said two soldiers were severely wounded overnight during an operation to rescue hostages being held by Hamas. Several militants who took part in the abduction on Oct. 7 were killed, the military said, but no hostages were rescued.
Heavy Israeli bombardment of Gaza has left widespread devastation in the Palestinian enclave.
Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza has now displaced about 85% of the enclave’s population, according to the U.N.
Hamas’s military wing said a hostage was killed when Israeli forces attempted to free him, publishing footage of his dead body.
Images of dozens of men stripped and detained on a street by Israeli forces circulated on social media on Thursday, among them a journalist for a London-based Arab newspaper, which said he had been detained in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza with relatives and other civilians.
Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said anyone who remained in northern Gaza after an order to move south in October was liable to be stopped and questioned.
“We check who is connected to Hamas and who is not,” he said.
Hamas said in a statement that the men had been taken from a school that was serving as a shelter for displaced civilians.
Authorities in Gaza say 17,700 Palestinians have been killed since the war began, mostly women and children. In addition, thousands are missing and presumed dead under the rubble. The official figures don’t differentiate between militants and civilians.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the funeral of an Israeli soldier.
Israel says it is targeting Hamas, in response to the attacks the group carried out on Oct. 7, and that civilians are being hit because Hamas hides amid the population.
Foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and the Palestinian Authority, held a joint press conference in Washington Friday arguing for a cease-fire and a boost to humanitarian assistance entering Gaza. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud told reporters that there are members of the international community who don’t view an end to the conflict as a moral and humanitarian imperative.
“We are all very much dismayed by that approach,” he said.
The U.N., which has been calling for a cease-fire, has been roundly criticized by both Israel and Hamas, even as its staff in Gaza have been killed and injured in the fighting, its humanitarian stores have been overrun and looted by desperate Palestinians, and its facilities damaged in Israeli airstrikes.
Israel regularly accuses the U.N., its senior officials and its agencies of harboring bias against the country and ignoring or downplaying Hamas’s atrocities against Israeli citizens. Earlier this month, Israel declined to renew the visa of the top U.N. humanitarian official in the West Bank and Gaza.
Hamas, meanwhile, on Friday said the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which runs medical clinics and schools and is the primary distributor of humanitarian aid in Gaza, played “a mysterious role in terrorizing the population of Gaza.” It called on the agency to cease distributions to Palestinian families.
While fighting raged in Gaza, five bases where U.S. and coalition forces are stationed in Iraq and Syria came under attack on Friday, including the American embassy compound in Baghdad, a U.S. official said. No casualties or damage to infrastructure were caused by the drone and rocket attacks, the official said.
Authorities in Gaza say 17,700 Palestinians have been killed since the war began. In addition, thousands are missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq and Syria have been targeted on at least 84 occasions since the war began, he added.
The commander of a key Iran-backed Iraqi militia said attacks on U.S. interests would continue as long as “Zionist crimes” were continuing in Gaza.
Abeer Ayyoub, Ghassan Adnan, Vivian Salama and Daniel Nasaw contributed to this article.
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