Israel pounded Gaza on Friday as Egypt hosted a Hamas delegation for talks aimed at ending the conflict that has devastated much of the besieged Palestinian territory. With vast areas of northern Gaza in ruins and largely deserted, Israeli air strikes and ground combat have focussed on central and southern districts, driving ever more displaced families into crowded areas around Rafah near the Egyptian border.
Intense fighting around central Deir al-Balah and the biggest southern city, Khan Yunis, has driven about 100,000 newly displaced people into already-overcrowded Rafah, said the UN humanitarian office, even as targets there were bombed too. Rafah residents combed through rubble for survivors and bodies after a deadly air strike Thursday.
One local man, Tayseer Abu al-Eish, said he was at home when “we heard a loud explosion and debris started falling on us. My daughters were screaming.”
The relentless bombardment has caused mass civilian casualties and sparked global calls for a ceasefire as alarm has mounted over the dire fate of Palestinians enduring hunger and sleeping in makeshift shelters in the cold winter months.
After another strike, in Deir al-Balah, one bereaved mother, Suhair Nasser, wept as she cradled the bodies of her twin children, exclaiming that “the house was bombed and the debris fell on the kids on 28 December, their birthday The military said it had “eliminated dozens of terrorists” across Gaza over the past 24 hours and was “extending operations in Khan Yunis”, the hometown of Hamas’s Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar.
Gunmen of Hamas, considered a “terrorist” group by the United States and European Union, launched an attack on October 7 that left about 1,140 people dead, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
The Palestinian militants also took about 250 people hostage, more than half of whom remain captive inside the war zone, some of them believed dead. Israel’s relentless military campaign since then has killed at least 21,507 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in Gaza.
Israel’s army says 168 soldiers have been killed inside Gaza. Hamas’s military wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, said Friday it had launched a fresh barrage of rockets at southern Israel.
Source: eNCA
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