Israel carried out new strikes on Sunday on the besieged Gaza Strip, where the toll of Palestinian civilians killed has continued to rise since the end of the truce with Hamas, despite pressing calls to protect the population.
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Engaged in a ground offensive since October 27 in the north of Gaza, where it took control of several sectors, the Israeli army has increased, since the resumption of fighting on December 1, air raids in the south, where Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians sought refuge.
The Hamas Health Ministry said Sunday that 15,523 people, 70% of them women and children, have been killed since the start of the war on October 7 in Israeli bombardments of the Gaza Strip, carried out in response. to the bloody attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement against Israel.
“During the past hours, only 316 dead and 664 injured could be taken out of the rubble and taken to hospitals, but many others are still under the rubble,” said the ministry spokesperson.
In the far north of Gaza, along the border with Israel, the Israeli army carried out airstrikes on Sunday followed by artillery fire, which raised thick plumes of smoke and dust.
AFP
In the south, since Friday, strikes have massively targeted the large city of Khan Younes and its surroundings, where every day now the Israeli army warns in leaflets dropped on certain neighborhoods that a “terrible attack is imminent”, and orders the residents to leave.
On Sunday, residents were fleeing the city, on foot, piled into carts or by car, their belongings piled on the roof, according to AFP images.
In Israel, the attack of unprecedented violence carried out on October 7 by Hamas commandos infiltrated from the Gaza Strip left 1,200 dead, mostly civilians, according to the authorities.
AFP
In response, Israel declared war on Hamas and promised to destroy the Islamist movement, in power since 2007 in Gaza.
A truce, negotiated by Qatar with the support of the United States and Egypt, held for seven days between November 24 and December 1. It allowed 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 from Egypt of hundreds of humanitarian aid trucks into the small devastated territory. .
Both camps blame each other for the end of the truce.
“500 tunnels” destroyed
The Israeli army said on Sunday that it had carried out “around 10,000 airstrikes since the start of the war”. It also announced that it had destroyed since the start of its ground offensive around 500 tunnel entrances used by Hamas, out of a total of around 800 that had been discovered.
These tunnel entrances were “located in civilian areas, many inside civilian buildings, such as schools, kindergartens, mosques or playgrounds,” the army said.
AFP
Israel accuses Hamas of having installed its infrastructure in a huge network of tunnels dug underground in Gaza, particularly in inhabited areas, and of 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 towards Israel. Most of the devices are intercepted by the Israeli air defense system.
Israeli authorities also announced the death of two soldiers during the ground offensive, bringing to 398 the number of soldiers killed since October 7, including 72 dead in the fighting in Gaza.
“Too many” victims
“There is no other way to win than by continuing our ground campaign,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Opposite, the number two of the Hamas political bureau, Saleh al-Arouri, declared: “The price to pay for the release of Zionist prisoners will be the release of all of 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 release during the truce of 80 of them in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners, while 25 other hostages were released on the sidelines of the agreement.
A total of 6,600 Palestinians were incarcerated in Israeli prisons before the recent releases, according to the Prisoners’ Club, a Palestinian NGO defending prisoners.
Without calling into question the right of their ally “to defend itself”, the United States warned Israel against the increase in civilian victims.
“Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed,” insisted 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 were killed in this war and would still be alive” if Hamas had not launched its October 7 attack, the government spokesperson responded on Sunday Israeli Eylon Levy.
“Don’t they have pity?”
In the Gaza Strip, the strikes destroyed or damaged more than half of the homes, according to the UN, whose Secretary General Antonio Guterres spoke of “a monumental humanitarian catastrophe”.
The needs are immense in the territory subject to a “complete siege” by Israel since October 9, where 1.8 million people, out of 2.4 million inhabitants, have been displaced by the war according to the UN .
The UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, ruled that the evacuation orders given by Israel to the population resulted in “hundreds of thousands of people finding themselves confined to increasingly small areas”.
He was concerned about the lack of water, food and healthcare, especially since there is, according to him, “no safe place in Gaza”.
AFP
In the hospitals of the south of the Gaza Strip overwhelmed by the influx of wounded, where the fuel reserves to run the generators are almost dry, there is chaos.
At the Nasser hospital in Khan Younès, the largest in the south of the territory, new wounded and new bodies, sometimes with no one to identify them, flock to each explosion.
These wounded are in addition to those transported from the north, where “no hospital can provide surgical operations anymore”, according to the UN.
In this hospital, Ehab al-Najjar, a nearby resident, let his anger explode.
“I went home and saw the bomb fall on our house,” he told AFP, describing bodies in the street. “Half were young children. What was their fault? (…) Don’t they have pity?
In the nearby town of Rafah, residents stomping through rubble gathered around a huge crater. “It’s an extraordinary bombardment. We don’t know why. We don’t know for what purpose,” exclaimed one of them, Mohammad Fahjan.