Palestinians grieve the 28 people slain in attacks on camps for refugees
In downtown Gaza, mourners gathered outside a hospital on Wednesday morning to offer funeral prayers for the 28 individuals who had died the night before in three different Israeli bombs on urban refugee camps. Before the dead were removed on donkey carts to be buried, footage showed mourners praying over the funeral shrouds covering the bodies.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he is ready to launch a Rafah ground attack despite reservations expressed by US President Joe Biden, despite the ongoing violence in Gaza. Prior to the cease-fire negotiations, Qatari officials expressed their cautious optimism after discussions with Israel’s top intelligence officials in Doha. However, any negotiations would be derailed by an Israeli ground attack in Rafah, spokeswoman Majed al-Ansari of the Qatari Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 31,819 Palestinians have died. The ministry does not distinguish between fighters and civilians when calculating the death toll, although it does state that women and children account for two-thirds of the dead. An UN food agency issued a dire warning, stating that “famine is imminent” in Gaza.
Battle rage close to the hospital
Tuesday saw Israeli soldiers assault the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip for a second day, causing explosions and gunfire to rock the area. It was not possible to get independent confirmation that the 50 Hamas terrorists the IDF claimed to have killed at the hospital were indeed fighters. On Tuesday, when fierce combat broke out in neighboring areas between Hamas rebels and forces, thousands of Palestinian patients, medical personnel, and displaced residents found themselves trapped within the vast complex.
First, Israel is developing its own food
Israel is attempting to guarantee food security throughout the nation for the first time in its history. In light of this, Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture said that it is “changing its face and focusing its mission” in a new manner and is creating a proposal for a national strategy in collaboration with other ministries. The ministry plans to rename itself the “Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security” in order to highlight how important this is. The ministry announced that it will present a decision-making proposal to the government in the coming days for approval in order to create a national plan for food security. This plan will include setting intermediate goals for 2030 and 2040 and include goals for the supply of food to the entire population until the year 2050.
Israel ranks fifth on a happiness ranking, despite conflict.
Israel came in sixth in the 2024 World Happiness Report, which was unveiled on Wednesday, despite fighting Hamas for five months. “The reason lies in the fact that life satisfaction, the index by which the level of happiness is measured, is a stable index over time and refers more to the characteristics of the country itself, such as the strength of the economy, the degree of social involvement, and the health services in the country, than to fleeting feelings,” said Anat Panti, a happiness policy researcher at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan.
