Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised this Wednesday that Israel will do everything possible to avoid more civilian casualties in the war it is currently waging with the Islamist group Hamas.
“As we move forward in this war, Israel will do everything possible to keep civilians out of harm’s way,” Netanyahu said in Tel Aviv at the start of a meeting with US President Joe Biden.
“We ask [aos civis] and we continue to ask them to move to safe areas,” said Netanyahu, quoted by the Spanish agency EFE.
Israel had ordered more than a million Palestinians to leave the northern Gaza Strip in anticipation of a possible ground offensive against Hamas.
Biden told Netanyahu that the United States was also committed to preventing “new tragedies” for civilians in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, which left thousands dead on both sides in 12 days.
“We will continue to work with you and our partners throughout the region to prevent further tragedies for innocent civilians,” Biden said, according to the French agency AFP.
Biden was supposed to travel to Amman today to participate in a summit with King Abdullah II of Jordan and the presidents of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, but the meeting was canceled.
The cancellation announcement was made by Jordan following news of the deaths of hundreds of people in a Gaza hospital on Tuesday, which Hamas attributed to Israeli bombing.
Israel denied attacking the hospital and attributed the explosion to a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, which the Israeli army denied.
The current war between Israel and Hamas was triggered by the Islamist group’s attack on Israeli territory on October 7, which according to Tel Aviv authorities left 1,400 dead.
Israel has since surrounded the Gaza Strip and vowed to annihilate Hamas, which has controlled the enclave of 2.3 million people since 2007.
Israeli bombings against Gaza have caused at least 3,200 deaths, according to the authorities of the small territory located on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
Source: TSF
