Despite Days of Most Violent Israeli Airstrikes
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Gaza authorities say more than 2,200 people have been martyred, a quarter of them children, and nearly 10,000 wounded.
Israel had given the population of the northern half of the Gaza Strip, which includes the enclave’s biggest settlement Gaza City, until Saturday morning to move south.
As the deadline passed, troops were massing around the Gaza Strip. Outside Gaza, hardline prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Israeli infantrymen and told them to be ready for “the next stage,” without elaborating.
Hamas has told people not to leave and says roads out are unsafe. It says dozens of people had been martyred in strikes on cars and trucks carrying refugees on Friday.
In Gaza City’s Tel Al-Hawa neighborhood, in the area Israel ordered evacuated, warplanes bombed a residential area during the night hitting several houses, according to residents who took refuge at the nearby Al Quds hospital.
“We lived a night of horror. Israel punished us for not wanting to leave our home. Is there brutality worse than this?” a father of three said by telephone from the hospital.
“I was never going to leave, I prefer to die and not leave, but I can’t see my wife and children die before my eyes.”
The Palestinian Red Crescent said it had received an Israeli order to evacuate the hospital by 4:00 pm, but would not do so because it had a humanitarian duty to keep providing services to the sick and wounded.
One million people, almost half Gaza’s population, have fled their homes in the past week including hundreds of thousands headed south from northern Gaza after the Israeli order, the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA said.
In Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, where Israeli planes struck a four-storey building overnight, neighbors rushed to rescue people.
A Gaza journalist filmed an ambulance crew searching for survivors of a nighttime airstrike. A paramedic could be seen walking into an alley lit by a headlamp when a huge flash from another strike burst in front of him. Medics raced into ambulances and sped off as planes roared above. One injured medic screamed: “My eyes! My eyes!”
Hamas’s armed wing said nine captives including four foreigners had been killed overnight due to Israeli airstrikes.
Attacks on Gaza failed to halt Hamas missile strikes deep into Israeli cities. Air raid sirens wailed in central Occupied Palestine on Saturday and rockets smashed into a greenhouse in Asqalan and wounded four people at a kibbutz.
Hamas has vowed to fight until the last drop of blood, and says the order to leave the north of the enclave is a trick to force residents to give up their homes.
The Israeli violence in Gaza has been accompanied by the deadliest clashes at Lebanon’s northern border since 2006, raising fears of war spreading to another front.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement said it had fired at five Israeli outposts in the Shebaa Farms area with guided missiles and mortar bombs.
The United States has firmly backed its ally the occupying regime of Israel.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on a lightning tour of the Middle East, sought China’s cooperation in preventing the Israel-Hamas conflict from widening during a phone call with his Chinese counterpart.
Washington is determined to ensure Iran and resistance groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah do not enter the conflict.
Israeli raids on the eighth day of its ongoing bombardment in Gaza have killed an average of over two Palestinians every 10 minutes, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said in a statement.
Saturday was shaping up to be the deadliest day since the Zionist regime started a brutal indiscriminate bombing campaign in Gaza.
Non-stop raids across overcrowded areas on Saturday have so far left at least 310 people martyred by the time of filing this report. Scores more were martyred since this tally was announced by the Palestinian ministry of health.
On average, at least 273 Palestinians have been killed each day since 7 October. However,
the intensity of Israeli shelling appears to be growing each day, with the daily death toll spiking with it.
The intensifying bombing campaign is happening while Israel cuts electricity, fuel, food and water supply to Gaza and blocks aid from entering through Egypt.
Palestinian civilians and officials in Gaza have warned that a humanitarian disaster is unfolding with hospitals, medics, relief agencies, and news organizations nearing a complete collapse of their operations.
Clean and drinking water is running out, forcing people to use dirty water from wells and increasing risks of waterborne diseases, the UNRWA said.
Water supply has also been impacted by the total electricity blackout imposed by Israel since 11 October.
An Israeli army veteran who was involved in a 1948 massacre of Palestinian civilians called on Zionists to “erase the memory of... families, mothers and children”.
Ezra Yachin, 95, is one of more than 300,000 army reservists mobilized by Israel since war broke out with Hamas in Gaza a week ago.
“Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them,” Yachin said while addressing Israeli troops this week, in a video that has since gone viral.
“Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.
“Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.”
Israeli columnist and journalist Gideon Levy said the Zionist regime’s order to forcibly eject 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza from their homes within 24 hours is “impossible, illegal, inhuman and impractical”.
“In other words, Israel is threatening to commit a war crime the likes of which we have not seen since the Nakba of 1948,” Levy said in an op-ed published on Middle East Eye.
“These are dark days. Dark days for Israelis, who woke up last Saturday to a reality that turned upside-down their conception of their world that they had embraced for years.”
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