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SvennoJ on 14 June 2024
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Hamas ceasefire stance shows confidence of ‘winning in the Gaza Strip’: Monitors

US-based defence think tanks, Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Critical Threats Project (CTP), say that Hamas’s recent ceasefire proposal amendments demonstrate that the Palestinian armed group is “confident that it is winning in the Gaza Strip”.

“Senior Hamas officials have repeatedly expressed confidence that Hamas will survive the war, despite Israeli military pressure,” the ISW/CTP say in their Gaza report. “Hamas forces throughout the Gaza Strip remain combat effective and are trying to reconstitute. Hamas has also begun trying to reassert its political authority in some parts of the strip,” the war monitors said.

The monitors also noted that Israeli forces concluded a weeklong operation in the Zeitoun and Sabra neighbourhoods of Gaza City on Thursday and that Israel has now “conducted at least five distinct clearing operations” in Zeitoun since the start of the war.

Hamas fighters carried out rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli forces deployed along the Netzarim Corridor on Thursday while fighters mortared Israeli forces pushing into the west of Rafah.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired rockets at Israel’s Ashdod and Ashkelon cities, as well as a number of smaller Israeli towns, and mortared Israel forces at the Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) border crossing with Gaza.

Human Rights Watch calls for accountability as Israeli military added to UN ‘list of shame’

HRW’s director of child rights, Jo Becker, said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s inclusion of Israel on the UN’s list of countries that commit “grave violations against children” in armed conflict was “fully justified”.

Though the UN had already attributed 8,700 child casualties to Israel’s military between 2015 and 2022, “in 2023, the scale of the violations was apparently too large for the secretary-general to ignore”, Becker said in a statement.

Becker said the UN secretary-general had been criticised in the past for “omitting some parties from the ‘list of shame’ despite evidence of violations in UN reports”.

Now, the UN Security Council must “hold those responsible to account and make clear that children are off-limits in armed conflict”, she added.