Israel carried out new attacks on Sunday in the besieged Gaza Strip, where the number of Palestinian civilians killed has continued to rise since the end of the ceasefire with Hamas despite urgent calls to protect the population.
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Since October 27, the Israeli army has carried out a ground offensive in the north of the Gaza Strip, taking control of several sectors there. Since fighting resumed on December 1, it has increased airstrikes in the south, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have sought refuge.
Hamas’ health ministry said on Sunday that since the war began on October 7, 15,523 people, 70% of them women and children, have been killed in Israeli bombings of the Gaza Strip in response to the bloody attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement against Israel.
“In the past few hours, only 316 dead and 664 injured people have been rescued from the rubble and taken to hospitals, but many others are still lying under the rubble,” said the ministry spokesman.
In the far north of the Gaza Strip, along the border with Israel, the Israeli army carried out airstrikes on Sunday, followed by artillery fire that kicked up thick clouds of smoke and dust.
AFP
In the south, there have been massive attacks on the major city of Khan Younes and its surroundings since Friday, where the Israeli army is now warning every day in leaflets in certain neighborhoods that a “terrible attack is imminent” and urging residents to leave.
According to AFP images, residents fled the city on Sunday, on foot, piled into carts or by car, their belongings piled on the roof.
In Israel, the unprecedented violent attack on October 7th by Hamas commandos infiltrated from the Gaza Strip claimed 1,200 lives, mostly civilians, according to the authorities.
AFP
In response, Israel declared war on Hamas and vowed to destroy the Islamist movement that has held power in Gaza since 2007.
A ceasefire negotiated by Qatar with the support of the United States and Egypt, which lasted for seven days between November 24 and December 1. It enabled the release of dozens of hostages kidnapped in Israel on October 7 in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons, as well as the entry of hundreds of humanitarian aid trucks from Egypt into the small devastated area.
Both camps blame each other for the end of the ceasefire.
“500 tunnels” destroyed
The Israeli army said on Sunday it had carried out “around 10,000 air strikes since the start of the war.” It also announced that it had destroyed around 500 tunnel entrances used by Hamas since its ground offensive began, out of a total of around 800 tunnel entrances discovered.
These tunnel entrances were “in civilian areas, many within civilian buildings such as schools, kindergartens, mosques or playgrounds,” the army said.
AFP
Israel accuses Hamas of installing its infrastructure in a vast underground network of tunnels in the Gaza Strip, particularly in populated areas, and using civilians as human shields.
On Sunday, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, considered terrorist organizations by the United States, the European Union and Israel, announced new rocket attacks on Israel. Most of the devices are intercepted by the Israeli air defense system.
Israeli authorities also announced the deaths of two soldiers during the ground offensive, bringing the number of soldiers killed since October 7 to 398, including 72 killed in the fighting in Gaza.
“Too many” victims
“There is no other way to win but to continue our ground campaign,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
In contrast, Saleh al-Arouri, the number two in Hamas’ political bureau, declared: “The price for the release of Zionist prisoners will be the release of all our prisoners after a ceasefire.”
The army estimated that around 240 people were kidnapped in Israel on the day of the attack and taken to Gaza. According to the army, 137 hostages are still in the hands of Hamas or affiliated groups after the ceasefire released 80 of them in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners, while 25 other hostages were released on the sidelines of the deal.
According to the Prisoners’ Club, a Palestinian NGO that defends prisoners, a total of 6,600 Palestinians were incarcerated in Israeli prisons before the recent releases.
Without questioning its ally’s right to “defend itself,” the United States warned Israel of the increase in civilian casualties.
“Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed,” stressed American Vice President Kamala Harris since COP28 in Dubai, alarmed by “devastating” images from Gaza and calling on Israel to “do more to protect innocent civilians.”
“We completely agree that far too many people have been killed in this war and would still be alive,” Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy responded on Sunday if Hamas had not launched its attack on October 7.
“Don’t you have pity?”
In the Gaza Strip, the attacks destroyed or damaged more than half of the homes, according to the UN, whose Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it “a monumental humanitarian catastrophe.”
The needs are immense in the area, which has been under a “complete siege” by Israel since October 9 and where, according to the United Nations, 1.8 million people out of a population of 2.4 million have been displaced by the war.
The UN Human Rights Commissioner Volker Turk judged that Israel’s evacuation orders to the population resulted in “hundreds of thousands of people being confined to ever smaller areas.”
He was concerned about the lack of water, food and health care, especially since, in his opinion, there is “no safe place in Gaza.”
AFP
There is chaos in the hospitals in the south of the Gaza Strip, overwhelmed by the influx of wounded, where the fuel reserves to run the generators have almost been exhausted.
At the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younès, the largest in the south of the territory, new injured and new bodies pour in with each explosion, sometimes without anyone being able to identify them.
These wounded are in addition to those transported from the north, where “no hospital can now perform surgical procedures,” the UN said.
In this hospital, Ehab al-Najjar, a local resident, vented his anger.
“I went home and saw the bomb fall on our house,” he told AFP, describing the bodies in the street. “Half of them were small children. What was her fault? (…) Don’t they have pity?
In the nearby town of Rafah, residents stomping through rubble gathered around a huge crater. “It is an extraordinary bombardment. We do not know, why. We don’t know for what purpose,” shouted one of them, Mohammad Fahjan.