The Israeli army is shelling the Gaza Strip on Saturday, where it has been fighting the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas for eight months, while a key member of the war cabinet is expected to announce his resignation, amid disagreements with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In the early hours of Saturday, witnesses and AFP teams reported strikes in different sectors of the Gaza Strip, including the center of this microterritory, the scene of violent bombardments in recent days.
One of these strikes, Thursday, on a school of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), left 37 dead according to a local hospital.
Accusing Hamas of deliberately using the school to launch attacks, the Israeli army said it killed “17 terrorists” in the strike. Hamas, which said 14 children died, denounced “false information.”
The head of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, accused Israel of having struck “without prior warning” this school in Nousseirat which sheltered, according to him, “6,000 people displaced” by the fighting.
Israeli artillery fire was heard north of the city on Thursday, according to witnesses.
Nearby in al-Bureij camp, six people were killed and several injured in an Israeli rocket attack targeting a house, according to doctors at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Intense fighting between the army and Palestinian fighters is taking place in this camp and the neighboring al-Maghazi camp, according to witnesses.
In a statement, the Israeli army said it struck “dozens of terrorist cells and infrastructure, including a tunnel located in a civilian structure” during operations in Bureij and Deir al-Balah.
In the north, five people were killed and seven injured in a nighttime aerial bombardment on a house in the Sheikh Radwane neighborhood of Gaza City, a doctor at the Baptist Hospital and Gaza Civil Defense said.
“We heard the sound of a huge explosion […] We went there and found human remains of children, women and elderly people,” said Mohammad Abou Nahl, a resident of Gaza.
The war was triggered by an unprecedented attack on October 7 on Israeli soil by Hamas commandos infiltrated from Palestinian territory which resulted in the deaths of 1,194 people, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count made from official data.
In this attack, 251 people were taken as hostages. After a short truce in November which allowed the release of around a hundred of them, 120 hostages are still being held in Gaza, 41 of whom are dead, according to the Israeli army.
This Saturday morning, during “a difficult special daytime operation in Nousseirat, four Israeli hostages were freed,” the army wrote in a statement. They are Noa Argamani, 25, Almog Meir Jan, 21, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 40, all four “abducted” by Hamas on October 7 from the music festival site electro Nova, according to the Army.
In response to the October 7 attack, the Israeli army launched a deadly offensive in the small coastal territory where Hamas took power in 2007. At least 36,801 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed, according to a latest assessment Saturday from the Ministry of Health of the Hamas-led Gaza government.
The conflict has devastated much of the Gaza Strip and uprooted most of its 2.4 million residents who face the risk of famine.
International aid, whose entry into Gaza is controlled by Israel, only reaches a trickle in the territory where the unemployment rate has reached a “staggering level of 79.1%”, according to the International Organization of Labor (ILO).
In Israel, Benny Gantz, the former army chief who became a political rival of Benjamin Netanyahu, is expected to announce his resignation on Saturday evening, according to the Israeli press.
He called a press conference at 8:40 p.m. (1:40 p.m. Eastern Time) in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan.
On May 18, he issued an ultimatum to Mr. Netanyahu, demanding the adoption, by June 8, of an “action plan” on the post-war in the Gaza Strip, failing which he would be “forced to resign from the government”, which he had joined after October 7.
His National Union party (center right) tabled a bill on Thursday to dissolve Parliament and hold early elections, without much chance of succeeding at this stage, because Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud (right) still counts a majority of deputies.
But Mr. Netanyahu also faces pressure from his far-right allies who have threatened to leave his government in the event of a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.
The country was notably notified on Friday of its addition to the UN “list of shame” on the rights of children in conflict in a report expected by the end of June, announced its ambassador Gilad Erdan, saying: sickened” by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ decision.
A diplomatic source told AFP that Hamas and Islamic Jihad, another armed movement in the Gaza Strip, would also be added to this list.
As diplomatic efforts to secure a truce stall, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected next week in Israel, Egypt, Qatar and Jordan, to “promote a ceasefire proposal” recently presented by President Joe Biden, according to Washington.