03/12/2023 7:07 pm (current 03/12/2023 7:10 pm)
Hamas’ “terrorist targets” in its sights ©APA/AFP
The Israeli armed forces say they have carried out around 10,000 airstrikes against targets in the isolated Palestinian territory since the start of the war in Gaza. The military announced on Sunday that targets in the Gaza Strip included command centers, tunnels and weapons depots belonging to Palestinian terrorist organizations. The information could not initially be independently verified. The attacks continued on Sunday.
About three weeks ago, the army announced that the military had attacked a total of more than 15,000 targets in the coastal zone since the start of the war. Due to the high number of civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip as a result of the massive attacks, international criticism of the Israeli army’s actions is growing. The military, in turn, accuses Islamic Hamas of carrying out attacks from residential areas and hospitals and using civilians as human shields.
The current war in Gaza was triggered by the worst massacre in Israel’s history, which terrorists from Hamas and other extremist groups carried out in Israel, close to the border, on October 7th. More than 1,200 people were killed.
Israel has therefore set itself the objective of ending Hamas’s rule in the Gaza Strip. According to the Hamas health authority, more than 15,500 people were killed and thousands injured in Israeli attacks. According to the UN, around 80 percent of the approximately 2.2 million residents of the densely populated Gaza Strip are now internally displaced. According to Israeli reports, Palestinian extremists have fired around 10,000 rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel since the start of the war.
The Israeli army continued its bombardment on Sunday. Fighter planes and helicopters attacked “terrorist targets” overnight, including tunnel shafts, command centers and weapons depots, the Israeli military said in the morning. Additionally, a combat drone controlled by ground troops attacked and eliminated five Islamic Hamas terrorists.
The day before, Israeli naval units also attacked Hamas “terrorist targets” and outflanked ground troop deployments, it was said. These targets included terrorist infrastructures, navy ships and Hamas weapons.
According to Israel, more than 800 tunnel shafts have been found in the Gaza Strip since the start of the Gaza War. The military announced on Sunday that around 500 of them had already been destroyed. Among other things, explosives were used. Some of the tunnel shafts connected strategic underground Hamas facilities, the statement said. The information could not initially be independently verified.
According to the army, the tunnel shafts were located in civilian residential areas, sometimes near schools, kindergartens and mosques. Weapons were found in some of them. Israel accuses Hamas of using civilians as shields. Hamas rejects this.
Meanwhile, according to Palestinian authorities, seven Palestinians were killed in an attack by Israeli troops near the city of Rafah. There were also several injuries, the Hamas-controlled Interior Ministry said on Sunday. Rafah is located in the south of the Gaza Strip, on the border with Egypt.
Palestinian health officials say several people were killed in overnight airstrikes in the southern town of Al-Kharrara, near the town of Khan Younis. According to the Palestinians, attacks had already occurred on Khan Younis and Rafah on Saturday, resulting in several deaths.
According to a Hamas spokesman, around 700 people were killed in attacks in 24 hours. The spokesperson reported several bodies under the rubble. There are also great difficulties in rescuing the injured and transporting them to hospitals. Nowhere in the Gaza Strip is currently safe.
Israeli government adviser Mark Regev rejected claims that his country was not doing enough to protect the civilian population in Gaza in the fight against Hamas. “We are making maximum efforts, perhaps even unprecedented in similar circumstances,” Regev told the BBC on Sunday. Israel designated specific neighborhoods that would be targeted for attacks and warned local civilians in advance to leave them, Regev said.
The Israeli military called on Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip to abandon certain regions of the Khan Younis metropolitan area. It is said that people should go to known refugee protection facilities west of the city. The message also sent Palestinians further south toward Rafah.
The spokesman for the UN children’s fund, UNICEF, James Elder, harshly criticized the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip. A “bloodbath” is taking place there that is “immoral” and that “will certainly be understood as illegal,” Elder told Al-Jazeera news channel on Sunday during a visit to Khan Younis. Anyone who accepts this is making themselves guilty. “Silence is complicity,” said the visibly shaken Elder, who sometimes spoke with a trembling voice. Elder described the latest information about so-called “safe zones” for the Gaza population as a “misrepresentation.”
Meanwhile, foreigners and Palestinians with second passports continue to leave the Gaza Strip. More than 600 of them were expected to cross the Rafah border on Sunday and enter Egypt. This emerged from a list published on Sunday by the border authority on the Palestinian side.
Meanwhile, Britain wants to use surveillance flights to help search for hostages kidnapped by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The British military will carry out flights “over the eastern Mediterranean, including airspace over Israel and Gaza”, the Ministry of Defense in London said on Saturday night. The planes were unarmed, he said. They were only used to locate hostages. It did not provide information on the exact start date of flights.