Israeli strikes hit a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip after a deadly attack on a UN-run school, as the war launched by Israel after the Hamas attack on October 7 entered its ninth month on Friday .
The conflict has left tens of thousands dead, ravaged a large part of the Gaza Strip and uprooted most of its 2.4 million inhabitants who are facing the risk of famine.
Diplomatic efforts to achieve the first ceasefire since a week-long pause in fighting in November appear to have stalled, just a week after the new road map announced by US President Joe Biden.
On the ground, bombings carried out by aircraft, artillery and the military navy continued across the entire territory controlled since 2007 by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, according to witnesses and local sources.
In Deir el-Balah (center), six people were killed and six others injured overnight by a missile strike on a family’s house in the Al-Maghazi camp, according to a medical source.
A Palestinian Red Crescent official, Osama Al-Kahlout, reported the presence of “snipers positioned on several buildings […] east of Deir el-Balah” and added that “several injured people had been evacuated from the area because of the gunfire”.
The Israeli army said its troops were “continuing their operational activities in the areas of eastern Al-Bureij and eastern Deir el-Balah” in the center of the territory.
The army “eliminated dozens of terrorists, identified tunnels and destroyed terrorist infrastructure in the region” […] as well as in Rafah, where weapons caches were notably discovered, she added in a press release.
“The smell of corpses”
According to an AFP correspondent, Israeli warships fired several shells on Friday at homes in the area of the fishermen’s port of Sheikh Ajlin, west of Gaza City.
Military operations in Rafah, a crowded town in the south of the Gaza Strip, have pushed a million Palestinians to flee, according to the UN, and led to the closure of the crossing point with Egypt, essential to the entry of international aid in the besieged territory.
Fleeing the fighting and bombings, Palestinians displaced in the Gaza Strip go to cool off at Deir el-Balah beach, even if it is polluted by sewage, according to images from AFPTV.
The sea offers them a respite “from insects, heat […] and the smell of corpses,” Mohamed Ghaben, displaced multiple times within the territory since the start of the war, told AFP.
The war in the Gaza Strip was triggered by the attack carried out in southern Israel by Hamas commandos infiltrated from Palestinian territory on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of 1,194 people, the majority civilians killed that that day, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
“Hamas Base”
During this attack, 251 people were taken as hostages. After a truce in November which notably allowed the release of around a hundred of them, 120 hostages are still being held in Gaza, of whom 41 are dead, according to the Israeli army.
In response to the October 7 attack, the Israeli army launched a deadly offensive in the small coastal territory where Hamas took power in 2007. At least 36,731 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed, according to a latest assessment Friday from the Ministry of Health of the Hamas-led Gaza government.
On Thursday, a hospital in the Gaza Strip reported the deaths of at least 37 people in a bombing against a school run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), with the Israeli army claiming responsibility for the strike. which targeted “a Hamas base”.
The Israeli army said in a statement that “army fighter jets […] carried out a precise strike on a Hamas base located inside an UNRWA school in the Nousseirat region” (center).
Little hope for a truce
On the diplomatic level, Joe Biden presented on May 31 a road map proposed by him by Israel which provides, in a first phase, a six-week ceasefire accompanied by an Israeli withdrawal from densely populated areas of Gaza , the release of certain hostages kidnapped during the Hamas attack and Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
Hamas will present its response to this proposal “in the coming days,” said a “senior official” on Thursday cited by Al-Qahera News, a media outlet close to the Egyptian intelligence services.
But the contradictory demands of the two camps leave little hope of seeing the plan announced by Mr. Biden come to fruition.
Hamas says it is ready to accept a deal only if it includes a permanent ceasefire and the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip.
Despite international pressure, Israel, for its part, assures that it wants to destroy Hamas, which it considers a terrorist organization, as do the United States and the European Union.