UPDATED 12:04 P.M.
CAIRO/GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel launched fresh airstrikes on Tuesday against central Gaza, where the United Nations voiced alarm over an escalation of attacks that have killed more than 100 Palestinians over two days in one part of the enclave.
The war intensified around Christmas, particularly in a central area just south of the seasonal waterway that bisects the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army told civilians to leave the area, though many said there was no safe place left to go.
“We are gravely concerned about the continued bombardment of Middle Gaza by Israeli forces, which has claimed more than 100 Palestinian lives since Christmas Eve,” said U.N. Human Rights Office spokesperson Seif Magango.
“Israeli forces must take all measures available to protect civilians. Warnings and evacuation orders do not absolve them of the full range of their international humanitarian law obligations.”
Israel is determined to destroy Hamas despite global calls for a ceasefire in the 11-week-old war and new concerns the conflict could spread with U.S. and Iran-aligned forces attacking each other elsewhere in the region.
Since Hamas killed 1,200 people and captured 240 hostages on Oct. 7 in the deadliest day in Israeli history, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has responded with an assault that has laid much of Hamas-ruled Gaza to waste.
Palestinian health authorities said nearly 21,000 people had been killed in Israeli strikes, with thousands more feared buried under rubble. Nearly all of the enclave’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes, many several times.
Israel says it is doing what it can to protect civilians, and blames Hamas for putting them in harm’s way by operating among them, which Hamas denies. But even Israel’s closest ally the United States has said it should do more to reduce civilian deaths from what President Joe Biden has called “indiscriminate bombing”.
‘NO MAGIC SOLUTIONS’
Israel’s Chief of the General Staff Herzi Halevi told reporters in a televised statement on the Gaza border that the war would go on “for many months”.
“There are no magic solutions, there are no shortcuts in dismantling a terrorist organization, only determined and persistent fighting,” Halevi said. “We will reach Hamas’ leadership too, whether it takes a week or if it takes months.”
Since a truce collapsed at the start of December, Israel has extended its ground campaign from the northern half of Gaza to encompass the entire enclave.
In recent days, fighting in the north has remained as intense as ever, even as southern and central areas now holding hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians have become war zones.
At Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the largest medical facility in the southern Gaza Strip, medics said 10 Palestinians had been killed in two separate Israeli airstrikes.
“There were displaced people and residents inside the house, more than 20 people, children and women. We managed to rescue some children, but the rest were martyred,” said Khan Younis resident Salah Shaat, describing the aftermath of an airstrike at sunset on Monday.
Washington has openly pressed Israel in recent weeks to scale down its Gaza war from a full-blown military assault to a more targeted operation of raids on Hamas leaders. Israel says it will not stop fighting until Hamas is completely destroyed.
Netanyahu hammered that point on Monday at a meeting with lawmakers after visiting troops in Gaza.
“We are not stopping. The war will continue until the end, until we finish it, no less,” he said.
Netanyahu adviser Mark Regev told CNN on Tuesday that destroying Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, was “a prerequisite for a better future both for Israelis and Palestinians”.
“You won’t have a demilitarized and deradicalized Gaza without first destroying Hamas. You can’t have reconstruction in Gaza, rebuilding the lives of people without first getting rid of Hamas.”
Elsewhere in the region, U.S. forces have come under attack by Iran-backed militants in Iraq and Syria over Washington’s backing of Israel.
The U.S. military carried out retaliatory airstrikes on Monday in Iraq after a drone attack by Iran-aligned militants on a U.S. base in Erbil left one U.S. service member in critical condition and wounded two.
The airstrikes killed “a number of Kataib Hezbollah militants” and destroyed multiple facilities used by the group, the U.S. military said.
There were reports of new explosions near shipping off the coast of Yemen, where the Iran-aligned Houthi movement has attacked ships it says have links to Israel in the entrance to the Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
On Monday an Israeli airstrike killed a senior leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in Syria.
On the Lebanon border, Israel said on Tuesday that nine Israeli soldiers and one civilian had been injured by anti-tank missiles fired from Lebanon towards a church, drawing retaliatory airstrikes against Hezbollah targets.
“We are in a multi-front war and are coming under attack from seven theatres: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), Iraq, Yemen and Iran,” Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told lawmakers, listing six places where Iran-backed militants are active, as well as Iran itself.
“We have already responded and taken action in six of these theatres,” he said, without specifying the one that had yet to see Israeli action.
In India, there was an explosion near the Israeli embassy in New Delhi. Authorities said no staff were hurt.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo, Bassam Masoud in Gaza, Emily Rose, Dan Williams and Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Nick Macfie and Howard Goller)
———————————-
CAIRO/GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Israeli shellfire slammed into central Gaza on Tuesday after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged no respite in attacks on Hamas, as residents of the coastal enclave mourned more dead in a war that has cost more than 20,000 Palestinian lives.
Israel is determined to pursue its goal of destroying Hamas despite global calls for a ceasefire in the 11-week-old war, amid concerns the conflict could spread with U.S. and Iran-aligned forces attacking each other elsewhere in the region.
Since Hamas made the deadliest Palestinian militant attack on Israel in the country’s 75-year history, Netanyahu has responded with an all-out assault on Hamas-ruled Gaza. On Tuesday, the Israeli military said 160 soldiers have so far been killed in Gaza since ground operations began on Oct 20.
“Seventy-five years of suffering, our rights taken, our country seized, and our people slaughtered. Our rights, as people, are justifiable. What can we do?” said Mariam al-Omsi, walking along an alleyway after an air strike in Shaboura camp, near the town of Rafah in southern Gaza.
At Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the largest medical facility in the southern Gaza Strip, medics said 10 Palestinians had been killed in two separate Israeli air strikes.
Khan Younis resident Salah Shaat said he had heard a huge explosion at sunset on Monday that destroyed a building.
“There were displaced people and residents inside the house, more than 20 people, children and women. We managed to rescue some children, but the rest were martyred,” he said.
In Jerusalem, Israel’s military said the air force carried out a strike against 100 Hamas targets, including tunnel shafts, to assist ground forces.
It said in a statement that in Shejaia, a suburb near Gaza City, troops backed by aircraft killed several fighters spotted trying to plant a bomb underneath a tank. More than 10 fighters were killed in separate incidents in Khan Younis.
Netanyahu, who visited Israeli troops in northern Gaza on Monday, told lawmakers from his Likud Party that the war was far from over and dismissed what he cast as media speculation his government might call a halt to the fighting.
‘WE ARE NOT STOPPING’
He said Israel would not succeed in freeing its remaining hostages held by Hamas without applying military pressure.
“We are not stopping. The war will continue until the end, until we finish it, no less,” Netanyahu.
In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, Netanyahu reiterated three prerequisites for peace: Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarised, and Palestinian society must be deradicalised.
Retaliating against Hamas’ Oct. 7 cross-border rampage in which it killed 1,200 people and took about 240 hostage, Israel has been under pressure from top ally the U.S. to shift to lower-intensity warfare and to reduce civilian deaths.
Nearly 20,700 Gazans have been killed, including 250 in the last 24 hours, according to authorities in Gaza.
Elsewhere in the region, U.S. forces have come under attack by Iran-backed militants in Iraq and Syria over Washington’s backing of Israel in its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
In the latest tit-for-tat clash, the U.S. military carried out retaliatory air strikes on Monday in Iraq after a drone attack by Iran-aligned militants on a U.S. base in Erbil left one U.S. service member in critical condition and wounded two other U.S. personnel, officials said.
The air strikes killed “a number of Kataib Hezbollah militants” and destroyed multiple facilities used by the group, the U.S. military said.
IRAN-HAMAS TIES
Hezbollah has deep ties to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian faction backed by Iran.
The U.S. military has come under attack at least 100 times in Iraq and Syria since the Israel-Hamas war began in October, usually with a mix of rockets and one-way attack drones.
Washington has for weeks pressured Israel to take further steps to minimise civilian harm by designating safe areas and clearing humanitarian routes for people to escape. But the death toll keeps rising and Israeli operations have intensified.
Gemma Connell, a U.N. team leader deployed in Gaza, described what she called a “human chess board” in which thousands of people, displaced many times already, are on the run again and there is no guarantee a destination will be safe.
A spokesperson for the Israeli military said the army takes all feasible precautions to minimise harm to civilians, but that Palestinian militants use civilians as human shields – an accusation Hamas denies.
Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, Israel has laid much of the narrow strip to waste. The vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million population have been driven from their homes, and the United Nations says humanitarian conditions are catastrophic.
The Gaza war has also stoked violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, another territory where Palestinians seek statehood. Medics said two Palestinian males, aged 17 and 31, were shot dead by Israeli troops near the West Bank city of Hebron on Tuesday. A military spokesperson said soldiers opened fire at Palestinians who threw rocks, cinder blocks and petrol bombs at them.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo, Bassam Masoud in Gaza, Emily Rose in Jerusalem; Additional reporting by Philip Pullella in Rome, Nafisa Eltahir in Cairo and Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington; Writing by Michael Perry and Bill Maclean; Editing by Jamie Freed and Angus MacSwan)
Comments