Early Friday, the health ministry reported another 40 dead in strikes near Gaza City, and “dozens” more in Jabalia and Khan Younis.
A senior Hamas official accused Israeli forces on Friday of carrying out a “heinous crime against innocent civilians”
The Israeli army said Friday that over the past day the military had struck about 450 targets in the Gaza Strip by air, sea and ground
TEL AVIV ( Web News )
People who were gathering in Tel Aviv’s ‘Hostages Square’ scrambled for shelter as sirens wailed, signaling rockets being fired from the Gaza Strip on Friday, as interceptions were heard in Tel Aviv and other cities across the country.
A barrage of rockets that was launched from Gaza toward Israel on Friday forced many to run for cover in different parts of Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel continued striking northern and southern Gaza Strip.
The Israel-Hamas war entered its third month Friday, and the United Nations warned that its aid operation is “in tatters” because no place in the besieged enclave is safe.
Israel’s ferocious military assault on Gaza, a tiny, densely populated territory, has led to widespread civilian casualties and mass displacements, triggering international alarm.
The Israeli army said Friday that over the past day the military had struck about 450 targets in the Gaza Strip by air, sea and ground, signaling the continued intensity of Israel’s campaign.
In recent days, Israeli tanks have rumbled into southern Gaza, starting with Khan Younis.
An elderly Palestinian woman, who had previously gone viral for saying she was “older than Israel” in a video circulating online, was shot dead by an Israeli sniper in Gaza, Al Arabiya reported on Friday, citing a local photographer.
Hadia Nasr was born in 1944, four years before the ‘Nakba,’ the Arabic word for catastrophe that refers to the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation and the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
The war — which erupted when Hamas militants rampaged through southern Israel on October 7, killing about 1,200 people and abducting more than 240 others — has severely damaged or destroyed as much as 36 percent of all the buildings across the entire enclave, according to analysis of publicly available satellite imagery from the European Earth observation program Copernicus taken Wednesday.
A senior Hamas official accused Israeli forces on Friday of carrying out a “heinous crime against innocent civilians” after images of Palestinian men stripped to their underwear in Gaza circulated on social media.
Izzat El-Reshiq, who is in exile abroad, urged international human rights organizations to intervene to show what happened to the men and help secure their release.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it was concerned by the images and that all detainees must be treated with humanity and dignity in accordance with international humanitarian law.
Israeli TV showed footage on Thursday, which Reuters could not independently verify, of what it said were captured Hamas fighters, stripped to their underwear with heads bowed sitting in a Gaza City street.
“We are talking about individuals who are apprehended in Jabalia and Shejaiya (in Gaza city), Hamas strongholds and centers of gravity,” Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy told a regular briefing in response to a question about the images.
“We are talking about military-age men who were discovered in areas that civilians were supposed to have evacuated weeks ago.”
The Israeli military has been advising civilians to leave areas in Gaza where it plans to operate after launching its campaign to eliminate Hamas in the Palestinian enclave following the militant group’s October 7 killing spree in Israel.
One photo showed more than 20 men kneeling on the pavement or in the street, with Israeli soldiers looking on and dozens of shoes and sandals abandoned in the road. A similar number of men, also semi-naked, were crammed into the back of a truck nearby.
Some Palestinians said they recognized relatives in the images circulating on social media and denied they had any links to Hamas or any other group.
Reshiq said the men had been captured at a school in Gaza that was being used as a shelter after weeks of Israeli bombardments that have displaced many Gazans.
Early Friday, the health ministry reported another 40 dead in strikes near Gaza City, and “dozens” more in Jabalia and Khan Younis.
Israeli forces have encircled major urban centres as they seek to destroy Hamas over its unprecedented attack on October 7, when militants broke through Gaza’s militarized border to kill around 1,200 people and seize hostages, 138 of whom remain captive, according to Israeli figures.
In a Thursday phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Joe Biden “emphasized the critical need to protect civilians and to separate the civilian population from Hamas,” the White House said in a statement.
Biden also called for “corridors that allow people to move safely from defined areas of hostilities.”
Backed by air power, tanks and armoured bulldozers, Israeli troops are fighting in Khan Younis, the biggest city in southern Gaza, as well as in Gaza City and Jabalia district in the north.
Netanyahu said troops had closed in on the Khan Younis home of Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar, 61, vowing “it is only a matter of time until we find him.”
Israeli television stations aired footage Thursday of tens of blindfolded Palestinian men wearing only underwear, guarded by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, setting off strong reactions on social media.