الكاتب: kafej

As Palestinians take stock of the devastation wreaked by Israel’s military, Hamas says the world should do the same.

Hamas has invited Elon Musk to witness in person the scope of the violence and devastation heaped upon the Gaza Strip by Israel.

The invitation from senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan came on Tuesday. The previous day, the tech billionaire, who owns social media platform X, had visited a kibbutz targeted by Hamas gunmen during the October 7 attack and declared his commitment to do whatever was necessary to stop the spread of hatred.

Hamdan called on Musk, who recently met Israel’s prime minister and president, to also visit Palestine and acquire a more rounded perspective.

“We invite him to visit Gaza to see the extent of the massacres and destruction committed against the people of Gaza, in compliance with the standards of objectivity and credibility,” Hamdan said in a press conference in Beirut.

“Within 50 days, Israel dropped more than 40,000 tonnes of explosives on the homes of defenceless Gazans,” the official added.

Musk has recently faced criticism  that his social media platform is rife with anti-Semitism and white nationalist rhetoric promoting violence and hatred.

During his visit to Israel, the social media and technology mogul expressed shock upon seeing the decimated kibbutz of Kfar Aza, saying that Israel had “no choice” but to eliminate Hamas.

Musk also struck an agreement under which “Starlink satellite units [would] only be operated in Israel with the approval of the Israeli Ministry of Communications, including the Gaza Strip,” a sharp turn from his previous musing that he could provide Starlink to enhance communications in Gaza amid numerous telecommunications blackouts.

The Hamas official also called upon the US “to review [its] relationship with Israel and to stop supplying them with weapons,” and for the international community to quickly send specialised civil defence teams to help retrieve thousands of bodies from beneath the rubble.

As the truce between Israel and Hamas extends into its sixth day, aid groups are warning that the war-battered Gaza Strip is on the brink of a full-scale humanitarian crisis.

After nearly two months of Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the “humanitarian pause” was brokered to allow the release of Israeli captives in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. As part of the agreement, more humanitarian aid has been allowed into the Palestinian enclave that has been under near-total siege.

But while United Nations agencies and groups like the Palestine Red Crescent Society have been able to scale up aid entering the enclave through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, the temporary increase has been insufficient to meet the now critical needs of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million, nearly 80 percent of which is now displaced.

Here’s a breakdown of the aid that Gaza needs, and what it is receiving — even during the truce.

What has the truce changed?

The humanitarian pause began at 7am local time on Friday. Initially brokered for four days, it was extended on Tuesday for two days, which will expire on Thursday morning. As of Tuesday night, Hamas had released 81 of the 240 hostages taken captive while Israel had freed about 180 Palestinian prisoners.

Aid distribution efforts had previously stalled, with agencies warning that perishables were spoiling at the Egyptian border. Now, amid the logistic chaos of the renewed flows, they have been able to deliver limited assistance to the population.

How much aid is entering Gaza

Reporting for Al Jazeera from the southern town of Khan Younis, Hind Khoudary said on Tuesday that at least 750 trucks had crossed the Rafah border into Gaza since Friday.

That works out to roughly 150 trucks per day.

However, on Monday, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) told Al Jazeera that 200 trucks of aid would be needed daily over a period of two months to meet the population’s basic needs. Much more fuel is needed to enable the UN agency to power vital services such as sewage treatment plants and water desalination plants.

Even that — 200 trucks a day — falls far short of what Gaza, under a land, sea and air siege by Israel since 2007, was receiving before October 7. Before the current war, 500 aid trucks would enter Gaza daily on average, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Last week, Oxfam described the pause as “a band-aid to a bleeding wound”.

What is the humanitarian situation?

The war has devastated Gaza, killing nearly 15,000 people, with at least 6,800 presumed dead under the rubble. Tens of thousands of injured people have suffered due to medical shortages. While the truce has enabled Palestinians in the besieged enclave a little breathing space and some respite from the constant din of drones and warplanes, the humanitarian situation is dire.

Israel’s war has split the territory of 2.3 million people in two. As its attacks on the north intensified, the Israeli military forced people to move south, where supplies of food, fuel and water have been scarce.

International NGO ActionAid said deliveries were largely limited to the south, where 1.8 million people are now displaced. “For many women propping up households and facing more mouths to feed in Gaza’s overstretched shelters, renewed pauses will not come anywhere near close to helping improve the situation they’re facing,” said the NGO.

Al Jazeera’s Khoudary said: “[Palestinian] people are starving, they are striving to find food in the supermarkets and people don’t have the basic needs to continue and to help themselves to survive from starvation…”

OCHA said aid had reached heavily damaged northern areas, where many have remained – including vulnerable groups such as the elderly, injured and disabled people – amid intense air raids on homes, schools and hospitals. But it acknowledged that most of the assistance had reached only Gaza’s south.

The situation in the north remains dangerous, with concerns about dehydration and outbreaks of disease.

Deliveries of fuel to the north have been severely restricted by Israeli forces. The Kamal Adwan Hospital, the only medical facility still operating in the zone, has been starved of supplies necessary for operations.

“If the hospital is not supplied with fuel within hours, the department is at risk of losing those in it, including premature babies, under our care,” Dr Hossam Abu Safiya, head of the paediatric intensive care department, told Al Jazeera.

On Sunday, Cindy McCain, director of the UN World Food Programme, said the entire enclave was “on the brink of famine”. “This is something that … will spread. And with that comes disease and … everything else that you can imagine,” she told CBS, the US network.

What next?

As the truce inches to a possible end, residents fear the bombing will resume.

Israel, which is intent on obliterating Hamas’s presence in the enclave, has been briefing that the armed group has a command and control centre in southern Gaza.

While the south has been dubbed a “safe zone”, the Israeli military had repeatedly attacked Khan Younis prior to the truce. People in the south had been ordered to move towards a slice of the territory, called Muwasi, along the coast.

Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for UN chief Guterres, said negotiations must continue so that the truce in Gaza could be upgraded to a full humanitarian ceasefire. “This aid barely registers against the huge needs” of Gaza, he said.

Hamas and Israel released more captives and prisoners under a fragile truce that held for a fifth day as international mediators in Qatar worked to extend it.

Israel said on Tuesday that 10 of its citizens and two Thai nationals were freed by Hamas and had been returned to Israel, bringing the total number of freed captives to 86 from about 240 people taken to the Gaza Strip after Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel.

Soon after, Israel released 30 Palestinians from its jails, bringing the total number of freed prisoners to 180.

The list of released Palestinians included the names of 15 children – 12 from Jerusalem and three from the occupied West Bank – and 15 women – five from Jerusalem and 10 from the West Bank.

Late on Monday, Qatar announced an agreement to extend the initial four-day pause for an additional two days, under which further prisoner exchanges will be carried out. The truce is due to end after one more exchange on Wednesday night.

However, the heads of the US and Israeli intelligence agencies were in Qatar, a key mediator with Hamas, to discuss extending the truce and releasing more people.

Information minister says 13 military officers arrested in relation to the weekend assault in capital Freetown.

A series of attacks on military barracks and prisons in Sierra Leone over the weekend was a failed coup attempt, according to police and government officials in the West African country.

Information Minister Chernor Bah said that 13 military officers and one civilian have been arrested following the incident.

“The incident was a failed attempted coup. The intention was to illegally subvert and overthrow a democratically elected government,” Bah said on Tuesday.

“The attempt failed, and plenty of the leaders are either in police custody or on the run. We will try to capture them and bring them to the full force of the laws of Sierra Leone.”

The inspector general of police said the attempted coup “failed in the early hours of the 26th of November”.

William Fayia Sellu told reporters that “a group of people” had tried to illegally “unseat” the government with force.

Police have published photographs of 32 men and two women it said were being sought in connection with the unrest. They include serving and retired soldiers and police, as well as some civilians.

Government authorities have said at least 20 people were killed in the attacks and about 2,200 people also escaped from prisons that were attacked.

In televised remarks on Sunday, the country’s President Julius Maada Bio said that “most of the leaders” of the attack had been arrested, and that the government would continue to pursue the rest.

Those killed include 13 soldiers, three assailants, a police officer, a civilian and someone working in private security, according to authorities. Eight people were also seriously injured.

Tensions remain in Freetown, where checkpoints have sprung up and schools and banks remain closed, while a curfew is in place from dusk until dawn.

Frictions in the West African nation have been building since a contested election in June, with President Bio winning reelection amid concerns about the transparency of the election from European Union observers and United States officials.

Samura Kamara, candidate of the opposition All People’s Congress (APC), rejected the results and said that the election had not been credible.

The country has also struggled with the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and police opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators protesting high food prices last August.