Heavy fighting rocks Gaza, thousands flee war zone

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: Israeli forces bombed and battled Hamas in Gaza City on Wednesday as tens of thousands of Palestinians scrambled for a safe haven after the army issued an evacuation order for a vast swathe in the territory’s south.

Apache helicopters and Israeli quadcopter drones flew above Gaza City’s Shujaiya district as heavy gunfire echoed through the streets, said AFP reporters.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a US media report saying his generals were urging a Gaza truce even with Hamas undefeated, stressing on Tuesday that “this will not happen.”

Military chief Herzi Halevi meanwhile said Israel is engaged in “a long campaign” to destroy Hamas over the October 7 attack and to bring home the hostages held by Palestinian militants.

The United Nations warned that the almost nine-months-old war had “unleashed a maelstrom of human misery” and that the latest evacuation order had plunged yet more Palestinians into “an abyss of suffering.”

Ten days after Netanyahu said the war’s “intense phase” was winding down, the Israeli military again rained down air strikes and artillery fire on militants in the Shujaiya district.

The air force struck “over 50 terror infrastructure sites” across Gaza in 24 hours while ground troops “eliminated terrorists,” located tunnels and found weapons including AK-47 assault rifles, the military said.

The Israeli army — which issued an evacuation order for Shujaiya a week ago — on Sunday did the same for a larger area near Khan Yunis and Rafah in the south, raising fears of renewed heavy battles there.

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Tens of thousands of Palestinians have again taken to the road there, many bundling their scant belongings on top of cars or donkey carts as they sought safety elsewhere in the bombed-out wasteland.

The UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said 250,000 people had been impacted by the latest evacuation order that covers southern areas bordering Israel and Egypt.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the order covers 117 square kilometers (45 square miles), or “about a third of the Gaza Strip, making it the largest such order since October.”

The UN humanitarian coordinator for Gaza, Sigrid Kaag, told the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday that the war had now displaced 80 percent of Gaza’s population.

She also said not enough aid was reaching the besieged territory and that crossings must be reopened, particularly to southern Gaza, to avert a humanitarian disaster.

“Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been plunged into an abyss of suffering, their home lives shattered, their lives upended,” she said. “The war has not merely created the most profound of humanitarian crises. It has unleashed a maelstrom of human misery.”

Amid the war, siege and mass displacement, more than 150,000 people have contracted skin diseases in the squalid conditions, said the World Health Organization.

Wafaa Elwan, a Palestinian mother of seven who now lives in a tent city by the sea, said: “We sleep on the ground, on sand where worms come out underneath us.”

She said her five-year-old son, much of whose body was covered in rashes and welts, “can’t sleep through the night because he can’t stop scratching his body.”

The bloodiest ever Gaza war broke out after Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The militants also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the army says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive since then has killed at least 37,925 people, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

The Israeli military said Wednesday that “operational activities continue throughout the Gaza Strip.”

The Gaza civil defense agency said seven people were killed when a strike hit a family house north of Gaza City.

Another strike killed three people in a car at Al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Deir Al-Balah area, said an AFP reporter.

Air strikes also hit homes in Rafah, according to Gaza’s government media office.

The New York Times has quoted Israeli security officials as saying top generals see a truce as the best way to secure the release of the remaining hostages, even if that meant not achieving all of the war goals.

Netanyahu, who heads a government including hard-line right-wing parties, strongly rejected this on Tuesday and vowed Israel would not give in to the “winds of defeatism.”

“The war will end once Israel achieves all of its objectives, including the destruction of Hamas and the release of all of our hostages,” he said.

Heavy fighting rocks Gaza, thousands flee war zone

Python swallows woman nursing sick child in Indonesia

In central Indonesia, police discovered a woman dead inside a python’s belly after it had swallowed her.

Siriati, 36, had gone missing after she left her house Tuesday morning to buy medicine for her sick child, police said, prompting relatives to launch a search.

Her husband, Adiansa, 30, found her slippers and pants on the ground about 500 metres (yards) from their house in Siteba village, South Sulawesi province.

“Shortly after that, he spotted a snake, about 10 metres from the path. The snake was still alive,” local police chief Idul, who, like many Indonesians, has one name, told AFP.

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Village secretary Iyang told reporters that Adiansa became suspicious after he noticed the python’s “very large” belly. He called the villagers to help cut open its stomach, where they found her body.

Such incidents are considered extremely rare, but several people have been swallowed by pythons in recent years.

A woman was found dead last month inside the belly of a reticulated python in another district of South Sulawesi.

Last year, residents in the province killed an eight-metre python, which was found strangling and eating one of the farmers in a village.

A 54-year-old woman was found dead in 2018 inside a seven-metre python in Southeast Sulawesi’s Muna town.

And the year before, a farmer in West Sulawesi went missing before being found being swallowed by a four-metre python at a palm oil plantation.

Python swallows woman nursing sick child in Indonesia

Biden faces growing pressure to quit race as Democrats question fitness

United States President Joe Biden is facing growing pressure from within his party to prove he is physically and mentally fit for office, with a Democratic lawmaker publicly calling on him to end his re-election bid for the first time.

Biden’s candidacy has been under a cloud since a disastrous debate performance against Republican challenger Donald Trump that saw the 81-year-old Democrat stumble over his words and lose his train of thought.

On Tuesday, Lloyd Doggett, a House Representative from Texas, became the first member of his party to publicly call on Biden to quit the race.

“I represent the heart of a congressional district once represented by Lyndon Johnson. Under very different circumstances, he made the painful decision to withdraw,” Doggett said in his statement.

“President Biden should do the same.”

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a House Representative for Washington state, stopped short of calling on Biden to withdraw, but said she believed Thursday’s debate performance would cost him the election in November.

“We all saw what we saw, you can’t undo that, and the truth, I think, is that Biden is going to lose to Trump. I know that’s difficult, but I think the damage has been done by that debate,” Perez said in an interview with the KATU news channel in Portland, Oregon.

Jared Golden, a House Representative in Maine, also said that he believed that Trump would win and he was “OK with that”.

“Lots of Democrats are panicking about whether President Joe Biden should step down as the party’s nominee,” Golden said in an opinion piece published in The Bangor Daily News.

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“Biden’s poor performance in the debate was not a surprise.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Jim Clyburn also added their voices to those scrutinising Biden’s condition, saying it was legitimate to raise concerns about his health following the debate.

“I think it’s a legitimate question to say, is this an episode, or is this a condition? And so, when people ask that question, it’s completely legitimate – of both candidates,” Pelosi said in an interview with MSNBC.

While Democratic insiders have been privately raising concerns about Biden’s fitness with media outlets for days, the series of public comments intensifies pressure on the president to assuage growing doubts about his electability.

The White House said on Tuesday that Biden would hold a series of meetings and appearances to quash concerns about his fitness, including a news conference and his first sit-down television interview since May.

The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told a media briefing that Biden was sick with a cold during the debate and had “a bad night”.

“We really, truly want to turn the page on this,” Jean-Pierre told reporters.

“We really want to be able to get out there and speak directly to the American people.”

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During a fundraising event later on Tuesday, Biden blamed his poor performance on back-to-back trips to France and Italy, although he spent the week leading up to the debate behind closed doors at presidential retreat Camp David.

“I wasn’t very smart. I decided to travel around the world a couple of times,” Biden said.

Biden added that he did not listen to his advisers about his travel schedule and joked that he “almost fell asleep on stage” during the debate.

In a CNN poll published after the debate, three-quarters of registered voters said that Democrats would have a better chance at winning the election with someone other than Biden on the ticket.

Voters also favoured Trump over Biden, 49 percent to 43 percent.

Vice President Kamala Harris did moderately better, gaining the support of 45 percent of voters compared to Trump’s 47 percent.