Dozens killed in Israel’s fresh strikes on Gaza
Israeli strikes on Gaza killed dozens of Palestinians on Friday as the occupying regime announced the launch of a new ground offensive in Gaza City and ordered new evacuations in the besieged Palestinian territory.
Rescuers said on Friday that Israel’s military aggression had killed at least 30 people across the Palestinian territory since dawn.
A single Israeli strike on Khan Yunis killed at least 25 people, a medical source at the southern city’s Nasser Hospital told AFP.
“The situation is very dangerous, and there is death coming at us from every direction,” Elena Helles told AFP via text message, adding that she and her family were trapped in her sister’s house in Shujaiya.
Israeli minister of military affairs Israel Katz said on Wednesday that the regime would bolster its military presence inside the Gaza Strip to destroy the resistance forces’ infrastructure.
The operation would “seize large areas that will be incorporated into Israeli security zones,” he said, without specifying how much territory.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also said the occupation army was dividing Gaza and “seizing territory” to force Hamas to free the remaining Israeli captives seized in the group’s October 2023 attack on the occupied territories.
On Thursday, Gaza’s civil defense agency said more than 30 people, including children, were also killed in an Israeli strike on Dar al-Arqam school serving as a shelter for displaced Palestinians in the al-Tuffah neighborhood, northeast of Gaza City.
“One of the missing was a pregnant woman who was expecting twins,” the agency’s spokesman Mahmud Bassal said.
The Israeli military claimed it had struck a “Hamas command and control center in the area of Gaza City.”
“It was like the Judgement Day. They bombed us with missiles and everything went dark. We started looking for our children and our belongings but everything was gone. We couldn’t find our children,” sobbed Raghda al-Sharafa, who was among the displaced civilians sheltering in the school buildings.
According to Palestinian medical authorities, at least 100 Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes across Gaza on Thursday.
Hamas condemned the strike on the school, calling it a “heinous massacre” of innocent civilians.
The health ministry in Gaza said 1,249 people have been killed in the Palestinian territory since Israel resumed intense bombing on March 18, bringing the overall death toll since the war began to 50,609.
In Lebanon, Hamas’s military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, said that two of its members were killed in an Israeli strike after the Israeli military said the strike had killed a Hamas commander.
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam condemned the strike as a “flagrant attack on Lebanese sovereignty” and a breach of the November 27 cease-fire in the war between Hezbollah resistance group and Tel Aviv.
Israel has also issued evacuation orders to residents in parts of northern Gaza, instructing civilians to move west and south to shelters, warning that it planned to “work with extreme force in your area.”
The UN humanitarian office said around 280,000 Palestinians have been displaced since Israel ended the cease-fire with Hamas last month.