الكاتب: kafej

New footage has emerged showing the final heroic act of an off-duty British-Israeli soldier who threw back seven grenades targeted at a shelter by Hamas gunmen during the attack on a music festival on 7 October.

Aner Shapiro was killed when the eighth grenade thrown at him went off in his hand as he attempted to defend his fellow festivalgoers.

A four-minute dashcam video from a nearby car was posted on Telegram by South First Responders, a group that shares material on the attacks by Hamas.

Follow live: Israeli forces enter al Shifa Hospital in ‘targeted operation’

At one point, a person runs out of the shelter and appears to be gunned down by the Hamas fighters, who can also be seen firing bullets into the shelter.

The footage goes on to show several gunmen tossing grenade after grenade into the shelter which are thrown out by the 22-year-old staff sergeant until he dies.

His grandmother Yamima Ben-Menahem told Sky News last month how he valiantly stood up against the militants and did his best to keep people calm.

“They were trying to get out of the party and then there were alarms and there were missiles,” she said.

“And they went into a shelter he was with his friend Hersh Goldberg but there were about 30 other people there.

“First of all he calmed them down saying the army was only half an hour away and he was sure everything was going to be okay.

“He was a natural leader, wherever he was.”

She added: “He just stood there and threw back one grenade after the other.

“From what his friends told us he managed to throw back about seven grenades, and then the last one exploded in his hands.

“The people who survived started calling us after they found out who his family was and one after the other said ‘he saved our lives’.”

Read more:
Israeli forces enter al Shifa Hospital in ‘targeted operation’
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Families of Israeli hostages start five-day march demanding action

The Supernova festival near Re’im in southern Israel was attended by several hundred people when Hamas gunmen opened fire.

At least 260 bodies people were killed and many were kidnapped.

It was among several sites targeted by Hamas during its co-ordinated, multi-pronged and unprecedented surprise assault on Israel.

As the conflict between Israel and Gaza enters its 40th day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Wednesday, November 15, 2023:

Latest on human impact and fighting

• Ambulances and rescue services are no longer operational in Gaza City, according to a report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) on Tuesday.
• At least 11,078 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza since October 7, according to the last available toll from November 10. An additional 2,700 people – including an estimated 1,500 children – are believed to be trapped under rubble, either dead or awaiting rescue, according to UN OCHA.
• Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich has touted the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians in Gaza as the “right humanitarian solution” for the besieged enclave and region in a Facebook post on Tuesday. The remark comes amid hundreds of thousands of people being forcibly displaced in Gaza since October 7, and comments from other Israeli officials that Arab nations should take them in.
• On Tuesday, the United States and the United Kingdom announced a new round of sanctions on Hamas and some of its leaders to restrict their funding channels.
• Yemen’s Houthi group launched ballistic missiles on Israeli targets, a spokesperson of the group said on Tuesday. Israel’s military has not confirmed a Houthi attack but said its “Arrow” aerial defence system intercepted a missile near the Red Sea on Tuesday.
• After reporting a $6bn deficit in October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has approved an amended state budget for 2023 in response to the Israel-Hamas war.
• A “children for children” captive release is under negotiation, according to Israeli television station, Kan.

The situation at Gaza’s hospitals

• Israeli troops have entered al-Shifa Hospital’s surgical and emergency units. Tanks have been surrounding the hospital, Israeli soldiers searched the basement and also opened fire inside the hospital on Wednesday, medical sources told Al Jazeera.
• The White House said on Tuesday that it does “not support striking a hospital from the air”, and does not want to see civilians and patients there get caught in crossfire, according to Reuters, citing an unnamed spokesperson for the White House National Security Council.
• Earlier on Tuesday, hours before Israeli forces stormed the hospital, national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters that the White House had intelligence indicating Hamas tunnels under al-Shifa. Hamas rejected these claims in a statement on Wednesday, and said that the US’s adoption of this narrative is responsible for the attack on al-Shifa Hospital.
• Human Rights Watch has called for Israel’s attacks on Gaza hospitals to be investigated as war crimes, in a statement released on Tuesday.

Diplomacy

• Netanyahu slammed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for calling on Israel “to exercise maximum restraint” and saying that the killing of women and children needs to stop. “It is not Israel that is deliberately targeting civilians but Hamas,” Netanyahu wrote in a social media post directed at Trudeau on Wednesday.
• Netanyahu and US President Joe Biden discussed the latest developments in Gaza during a phone call on Tuesday. The White House readout of the call did not mention hospital attacks as a point of discussion and stated that the two spoke “at length” about securing captives.
• Meanwhile, thousands of protesters gathered in San Francisco to protest against Israel’s war on Gaza and get world leaders to push for a ceasefire ahead of a meeting between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
• The US has been ramping up its weapons transfer to Israel with increased arsenals and new equipment, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday citing an internal defence department list. Some of the items delivered include cannon ammunition, bunker-buster munitions, and night-vision devices.
• Indonesia and Malaysia’s defence ministers called for a ceasefire in Gaza during a regional meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on Wednesday.

Attacks in the occupied West Bank

• Eleven Palestinians were arrested in Israeli raids across the West Bank on Wednesday, according to Wafa news agency.
• Israeli forces demolished a Palestinian family’s house in Shuqba village, west of Ramallah, at dawn on Wednesday under the pretext of building without a permit. The family was informed about the demolition decision via a phone call one week ago, according to Wafa.

Israeli forces have raided al-Shifa Hospital, where thousands of Palestinians are sheltering, following days of heavy attacks in the area surrounding the complex in Gaza City.

Israel’s military said early on Wednesday morning that it was carrying out an “operation against Hamas in a specified area” at al-Shifa. Calling the assault a “targeted operation” on Gaza’s largest medical facility, it said the raid was based on Israeli and United States intelligence.

Israel accuses Hamas, the group that governs Gaza, of using the hospital as a base. Hamas rejects the claim. Israel has not produced evidence to back up its assertion.

Dozens of Israeli soldiers entered the facility while tanks were stationed in the yard of the medical complex, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said, reporting from Khan Younis on Wednesday. The raid “is considered to be very risky and dangerous as inside the hospital there are around 7,500 Palestinians including patients, doctors and displaced people,” he said.

Dr Munir al-Bursh, the general director of hospitals in the Gaza Strip, told Al Jazeera that Israeli forces searched the basement of al-Shifa and entered the surgical and emergency buildings within the complex.

Dr Ahmed El Mokhallalati, a surgeon inside the facility, reported heavy gunfire and explosions could be heard in the compound. “We saw the [Israeli] tanks and the bulldozers on the centre’s campus,” he told Al Jazeera.

About 700 patients remain at the hospital, including about 100 in critical condition, Mokhallalati reported. More than 1,000 medical staff are also trapped on site, but they are unable to treat patients due to a shortage of medicine and fuel.

Thousands of civilians displaced by Israel’s five-week bombardment of Gaza, which has killed more than 11,200 Palestinians, are also inside al-Shifa Hospital.

Mokhallalati described the fear that has taken hold among the thousands trapped in the facility. “We don’t know what they will do to us. We don’t know whether they will kill people or terrorise them. We know all the propaganda is lies, and they know as well as we do that there is nothing at al-Shifa medical centre.”

‘Barbaric crime’

The area around al-Shifa has been battered by multiple Israeli attacks for weeks. The Israeli government has issued warnings to evacuate the facility. However, Palestinian medical officials have rejected the order, saying they cannot leave their patients behind.

Amid the raid, Palestinian Authority Health Minister Dr Mai al-Kaila said, in a statement published by the Palestinian news agency Wafa, that Israeli forces “are committing a new crime against humanity, medical staff, and patients”.

The Palestinian government holds Israeli forces “responsible for the lives of the medical staff, patients, and displaced people in the al-Shifa complex,” she added.

Hamas said that it holds Israel and US President Joe Biden responsible for the implications of the raid, labelling it a “barbaric crime against a medical facility protected by the fourth Geneva Convention”.

“The Israeli occupation and everyone who colluded with it to kill children, patients and innocent civilians will be held accountable,” the group said in a statement.

The US said it “has information” that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad use Gaza’s hospitals, including al-Shifa, “to conceal and support their military operations and to hold hostages”.

At the same time, Washington has continued to offer words of caution, Reuters reported.

A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said: “We do not support striking a hospital from the air and we don’t want to see a firefight in a hospital where innocent people, helpless people, sick people trying to get medical care they deserve are caught in the crossfire.”

Hamas has denied it uses Gaza’s hospitals as a base and has invited the United Nations to send independent investigators to verify that Israel’s claims are “falsehoods”.

Ardi Imseis, an international law expert at Queen’s University in Canada, said Israel carries the burden to “produce evidence” and prove its claim that the hospital has been used by Hamas as a base.

“The object of the attack is a civilian object. Until such time that the Israelis provide proof that it has been converted into a military object, the civilian nature of the object does not change,” he said.

Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, told Al Jazeera that “the Israeli government has put forward no evidence that would justify stripping hospitals of their special protections under international humanitarian law”.

Even if Israel’s justifications for attacking hospitals are taken at “face value,” Shakir said, “international humanitarian law only allows attacking hospitals if room is made for safe evacuation”.

He added: “The reality here is there is no safe place to go in Gaza.”

Al Shifa Hospital has become much more than just a hospital during this war.

It is Gaza’s biggest hospital, a sprawling complex of 22 acres, housing emergency and neonatal facilities as well as specialist units.

But after Israel’s invasion of Gaza it has also become a refugee camp where thousands have sought sanctuary and shelter in its courtyards, corridors and wards from Israel’s unprecedented bombardment of Gaza.

More than that it has become a place that is symbolic of Palestinian resilience where doctors have performed heroically, saving lives in the most difficult of conditions.

Follow live: Israeli forces enter al Shifa hospital in ‘targeted operation

Dwindling fuel supplies have led to incubators being switched off, say officials there, and the deaths of a number of newborns.

The hospital is also becoming an outdoor morgue. Bodies have been piling up because of their sheer number and the lack of power to refrigerate them.

Israelis claim these reports cannot be trusted because Hamas controls the hospital’s staff. They almost certainly cannot speak entirely freely and when Hamas took over Gaza in 2007 it fired hundreds of staff affiliated with the more moderate Palestinian Fatah faction.

But what isn’t in doubt is the enormous pressure the hospital has been operating under and the extraordinary courage of its doctors and nurses. They have been operating against the odds as the war has closed in around them.

But al Shifa has a dark side, says Israel, and that claim has been backed up by US intelligence. Both claim the hospital is used by Hamas as a military headquarters in what would be a clear violation of the laws of war.

Israel, which has now carried out a targeted raid on al Shifa, claims there is a vast tunnel network under the hospital extending out across the Gaza Strip. It has produced diagrams of what it calls a subterranean terror complex. It says it believes hostages may be being held under the hospital and weapons arsenals and command centres are down there too.

Read more:
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It is hard to know for sure. There have long been claims of Hamas activity in the hospital. Ten years ago Amnesty International accused it of using wards to murder and torture rivals.

Western journalists have described Hamas fighters wandering its wards. More recently though, visiting medical professionals have expressed scepticism the hospital was being used by Hamas in a military sense anymore.

When Hamas violently seized control of Gaza in 2007 it allegedly purged al Shifa of doctors who were not compliant to its rule.

It has undoubtedly been used as a propaganda pawn by both sides in this conflict and that has intensified in the last week as Israeli forces encircled it.

Hospitals have protection from attack under the rules of war. But that immunity is forfeited if they are used as military bases.

Israel will need to prove its claims after it captures al Shifa. Otherwise this assault on a medical complex will be seen as a war crime when the reckoning comes for this conflict.

Cormorants have been a constant presence in Youichiro Adachi’s life, and when he was young, he cried whenever one of his family’s birds died.

Now 48, Adachi still cares deeply for his birds, drawing them out of their baskets each morning and stroking their long necks to confirm their health and maintain a bond.

“For me, cormorants are my partners,” he said.

Adachi is the 18th generation of his family to be a master cormorant fisherman and one of about 50 people in Japan carrying on the 1,300-year tradition of using trained birds to dive for fish. It is considered the ideal way to catch the sweet ayu river fish, and his family has a hereditary mandate to supply the delicacy to the Japanese imperial household.

The method, known as ukai, was once common in Japan and a version of it has also been practised in China. But today it is largely supported by tourists, who watch the fishermen and their birds bringing in the catch.

Now, environmental changes are making the fish ever more scarce and small, endangering the lifeline of the fisherman, known as usho, and their flocks.

“I go to the river every day so I can feel the changes,” Adachi said, drawing upon nearly four decades of working on the Nagara River in Oze, a town in central Gifu prefecture.

Come sundown between May and October, he boards a boat along with an assistant, a steersman, and about 10 cormorants leashed at the neck and body. A basket of flames swings out over the dark river, waking the ayu from resting spots among the stones below.

The cormorants catch them as they dart away, but the leash keeps the larger fish from going down the birds’ gullets. The birds are coaxed to release the fish into a bucket. And from a nearby observation boat, tourists take in the spectacle of splashing feathers and dancing fire.

As is common these days, the haul is tiny. Guests at a traditional ryokan inn run by the Adachi family are fed salted, grilled ayu, but it is supplied by a local fishmonger.

Adachi ascribes the dearth of fish to the weather, which he says has become more unpredictable, with heavier rains and flooding on the once calm river. And construction of flood barriers has led to smaller rocks and sand filling the river bottom, obstructing the larger rocks that form the ayu’s habitat.

“In the past, there were only big boulders, but now they’re small,” he said. “The sand and gravel has increased, and along with that the ayu have gotten smaller too.”

Environmental studies have confirmed his concerns. Temperatures in the Nagara River have risen to a high of 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), delaying the spawning period of the ayu by a month, said Gifu University associate professor Morihiro Harada.

The fish like to eat algae that grow on large stones, Harada said, but those rocks have become less common after repeated anti-flooding works carried out by river management authorities.

Down river from Oze, the usho of Gifu City has a larger, more tourism-oriented operation. Fleets of boats allow visitors to eat and drink as they watch the fishermen and birds.

The same environmental shifts also affect this business, with rough waters sometimes pushing the tourist boats off course or leading to cancellations.

To contend with the growing number of lost business days, an economic development body known as ORGAN set up an elevated riverside viewing deck on a trial basis, attempting to recreate the boat experience in evenings hosted by apprentice geishas and other traditional performers.

“We wanted to offer a more refined, higher-quality experience,” said ORGAN leader Yusuke Kaba.

Facing an uncertain future, Adachi can only honour the past and tend to the present. In his home, he prays before shrines dedicated to his usho ancestors. And in the yard, he tends to his 16 birds, one by one.

His son Toichiro helps out on the boat and is training to become the next master fisherman. Toichiro wants to carry on the tradition. But for now, the 22-year-old spends his days working with a computer at a maker of high-precision machine tools, the type of industry that transformed Japan’s economy and society in the post-war period.

“I want my son to inherit my job, but it’s tough to make a living,” Adachi said. “If we cannot catch fish any more, our motivation is gone and there’s no meaning in what we do.”