THE Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) in the Gaza Strip has called on the international community to exert pressure on the Israeli regime to reveal the fate of two of its staff and a six-year-old Palestinian girl who have been missing for a week.
PRCS made the appeal in a social media post on Thursday, 122 hours after the disappearance of their staff members Youssef Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoon as well as Palestinian girl Hind Rajab in the Tal Al-Hawa neighbourhood of Gaza City.
‘We urgently appeal to the international community to exert pressure on Israeli occupation authorities to disclose the whereabouts of Hind and the PRCS team,’ the group said.
On January 29, Hind was travelling in a car with her uncle Bahsar Hamada, his wife and their four children, fleeing the brutal bombardment by the Israeli regime.
On their way, Hamada’s car was stopped by the Israeli military. The stoppage was followed by a shower of bullets at Hamada’s car, which killed him, his wife and three of their children on the spot.
Layan Hamada, 15, survived with her cousin Hind. Layan was shot dead as she was speaking on the phone with the PRCS crew while Hind was still trapped inside the vehicle.
Around 6pm local time, the PRCS team reached the area to rescue Hind who as per the last update remained trapped alone in a car with the dead bodies of her uncle, aunt and cousins scattered around her.
Where is Hind who is missing after her family’s murder?
The world is still waiting for news of Hind, the 6-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza who begged for help in a tragic call.
The PRCS team had informed and coordinated with the Israeli authorities before dispatching an ambulance to the location but the NGO lost all contact with its crew after the team went to retrieve the girl.
Since then, demands for answers have been mounting over the fate of Hind and the PRCS medical workers.
Hind’s mother, Wisam, has also issued appeals to international rights organisations for help in finding out what happened to her daughter.
Israel waged its brutal war on besieged Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out an unprecedented operation against the occupying entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
So far, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 27,700 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 67,000 others.
Israel prepares massive offensive against Rafah
FEARS have mounted over a new carnage against Palestinians as the Israeli military prepares to conduct an offensive in the overcrowded Gaza city of Rafah.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that he had ordered troops to ‘prepare to operate’ in Rafah, home to about 1.4 million Palestinians who have been displaced due to the occupying regime’s genocidal war on the besieged Gaza Strip.
UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said an Israeli assault on Rafah, situated in Gaza’s closed southern border with Egypt, risks ‘claiming the lives of even more people’ and ‘hampering a humanitarian operation’ there.
‘As the war encroaches further into Rafah, I am extremely concerned about the safety and well-being of families that have endured the unthinkable in search of safety,’ he added.
‘Their living conditions are abysmal – they lack the basic necessities to survive, stalked by hunger, disease and death.’
Similarly, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that if Israel pushed on into Rafah, it would ‘exponentially increase what is already a humanitarian nightmare with untold regional consequences’.
‘I am especially alarmed by reports that the Israeli military intends to focus next on Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been squeezed in a desperate search for safety,’ he said.
Meanwhile, Raed al-Nims of the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said, ‘Everyone is afraid of the expanding of the ground operation into Rafah.’
On Tuesday, the UN’s humanitarian agency OCHA warned of a ‘large-scale loss of civilian lives’ in the case of an Israeli attack on Rafah.
‘Under international humanitarian law, indiscriminate bombing of densely populated areas may amount to war crimes,’ OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke told a UN briefing in the Swiss city of Geneva.
