The death toll in Gaza has surpassed 10,000 people, the Hamas-run health ministry said yesterday after nearly one month of bombardment by Israel whose offensive against Palestinian fighters showed signs of intensifying.
Determined to destroy Hamas after the attack in the first week of October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed no letup despite mounting calls for a ceasefire.
The total included 292 killed in the overnight barrage which hit two paediatric hospitals and Gaza’s only psychiatric hospital, the ministry said.
“These are massacres! They destroyed three houses over the heads of their inhabitants — women and children,” Mahmud Meshmesh, resident of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, said.
“We have already taken 40 bodies out of the rubble,” he said as crowds prayed around corpses wrapped in white shrouds.
Ground forces with tanks have flooded the northern half of the Gaza Strip and tightened an encirclement of Gaza City, effectively splitting the territory in two.
Israel’s ally the US sent its top diplomat Antony Blinken on a whirlwind Middle East tour that wrapped up yesterday in Turkiye, where again his host pressed for an Israeli ceasefire, which Washington has declined to endorse.
The heads of major UN agencies issued a joint statement also calling for a ceasefire inside the territory of 2.4mn people where an Israeli siege has cut off most water, food and fuel supplies.
“It’s been 30 days. Enough is enough. This must stop now,” the statement said.
The Israeli army said yesterday it had pounded Gaza with “significant” strikes on 450 targets, having said last week it had already hit over 12,000. It also reported seizing a Hamas command post and killing a Hamas commander accused of helping organise attacks and planning future incursions.
A top Hamas official in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, said the group, which fired 16 rockets from Lebanon towards northern Israel yesterday, would never accept a puppet government in Gaza and that “no force on earth could annihilate” it.
EVACUATIONS RESUME
Israeli troops and Hamas fighters have engaged in fierce house-to-house combat in densely populated north Gaza, where the UN says the war has sent some 1.5mn people fleeing to other parts of the territory.
Netanyahu, who has rejected any talk of a ceasefire until hostages are returned, has vowed to minimise civilian casualties.
Israel has air-dropped leaflets and sent text messages ordering Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza to head south. A US official said Saturday at least 350,000 civilians remained in the worst-hit areas.
The Rafah crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt reopened yesterday to allow the evacuation of foreigners and dual nationals, the Hamas government said, ending a two-day closure prompted by a dispute over the passage of ambulances.
Six ambulances carrying wounded Gazans arrived in Egypt yesterday as evacuations resumed, a border official said.
On his regional tour, Blinken called for “humanitarian pauses” while rejecting Arab countries’ demands for a ceasefire.
After meeting his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan yesterday, Blinken said Washington was working “very aggressively” to expand aid for trapped civilians in Gaza, but he did not provide details before boarding a flight to Japan.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was travelling across his country’s remote northeast yesterday, apparently snubbing Blinken.
Nato member Turkey, which is allied to the Palestinians, has said it is recalling its ambassador to Israel and breaking off contacts with Netanyahu.
WEST BANK UNREST
The war has exacerbated tensions in the occupied West Bank, where more than 150 Palestinians have been killed in clashes with Israeli forces and settlers since it started, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
In Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, a 20-year-old Israeli border policewoman died after a knife-wielding Palestinian fighter stabbed her in front of a police station, the force said.
The fighter, identified by police as a 16-year-old Palestinian from east Jerusalem, was killed.
And elsewhere in the West Bank, Israeli forces killed four Palestinians yesterday, according to the Ramallah-based Palestinian health ministry.
ACTIVIST ARRESTED
The Israeli military said yesterday it had arrested Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, 22, in a raid in her West Bank town of Nabi Salih on suspicion of “inciting violence and fighters’ activities”.
Overall, the army said more than 1,350 Palestinians had been arrested across the West Bank since October 7, with “over 850 of them affiliated with Hamas”.
Tamimi became prominent at age 14 when she was filmed biting an Israeli soldier to prevent him from arresting her younger brother, and for later slapping another Israeli soldier.
A large portrait of her was painted on the Israeli separation wall with the West Bank.