This Friday, the PCP demanded to hear Foreign Minister Paulo Rangel to explain the government’s position on the situation in Palestine, stressing that Israel’s announced offensive on Rafah raises “fears of a massacre.”
In a request addressed to the chairman of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs and Portuguese communities, PS MP Sérgio Sousa Pinto, the PKP expresses its “greatest concern” about Israeli military operations in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. .
“In the last few days alone, Israeli aircraft have carried out more than 50 attacks on various sites in Rafah, where the territory’s 1.5 million residents are sheltering,” the report said.
The PKP warns that “the announced attack on the city raises fears of a massacre, which represents a crime of enormous proportions, all the more serious because it is an attack aimed at people in an extremely vulnerable situation, exhausted, hungry, in a situation from which there is no way out that guarantees their safety.”
“To date, Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since October are estimated to have killed more than 34,000 Palestinians – mostly children, women and the elderly – and injured more than 77,000, with thousands more Palestinians missing,” he says.
Faced with this situation, “and taking into account the urgent need to mobilize the international community to demand an immediate ceasefire, humanitarian assistance to the population and the search for a peaceful solution,” the PCP requests that Paulo Rangel be heard to “give an explanation for the position of the Portuguese government and its actions internationally.” level in this process.”
The Israeli army said it was continuing “operations” in eastern Rafah and had resumed military activities in the Zeitoun area of Gaza City, where it said Hamas forces were located.
Israel launched a military operation in Rafah on Monday but insists it is a “targeted” attack on eastern Rafah, on the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, home to some 1.5 million displaced people, more than half of Gaza’s population.
On Monday, the Israeli army ordered the withdrawal of about 100,000 people from the eastern part of the city and on Tuesday took control of the Rafah crossing, which connects the enclave with Egypt.
This passage is vital for the flow of humanitarian aid. The UN indicated that about 110,000 Palestinians from Rafah have been forced to flee their homes due to the violence.
Hamas says more than 34,900 Gazans have been killed in seven months of war, including 15,000 children, and some 10,000 bodies remain missing under the rubble.