The Israeli army on Saturday shelled the north of the Gaza Strip where fighting against the Palestinian movement Hamas rages, the day after deadly shootings near an office of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Exchanges of fire broke out early Saturday between Palestinian fighters and Israeli forces in the city of Gaza (North), according to an AFP journalist. In the Zeitoun neighborhood, witnesses saw Israeli helicopters firing on Palestinian fighters.
The army claimed that its troops had “eliminated” the day before “several terrorists” in the center of the Palestinian territory and the Rafah region, in the far south of the narrow strip of land.
Also on Friday, the army exchanged new cross-border fire with Lebanese Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, a sign of heightened tensions on the Israeli-Lebanese border, which raise fears of an extension of the conflict.
In the south of the besieged Palestinian territory, “large caliber” gunfire caused “a massive influx of victims to the Red Cross field hospital” on Friday evening, near its office, which “received 22 dead and 45 injured,” the ICRC said, without specifying the origin of the shots.
The Ministry of Health of the government of Gaza, a territory ruled by Hamas, accused Israel of having “targeted the tents of displaced civilians in Al-Mawasi”, reporting 25 dead and 50 injured.
The coastal area of Al-Mawasi, near Rafah, is home to displaced people driven out by fighting in the rest of the Palestinian territory. It had been declared a “humanitarian zone” by Israel, in theory safe for the displaced.
An Israeli army spokesperson told AFP that “an initial investigation suggests that there is no indication that a strike was carried out” by the army in Al-Mawasi.
Sitting on a stone, a Palestinian woman cries on Saturday in front of the body of a relative wrapped in a white tarpaulin, killed in these shots.
Men carry the body of another victim on a stretcher, with walls blackened by flames in the background. Smoke still escapes from the ashes in a patch of land reduced to a field of charred debris.
“Recently, army warplanes struck two Hamas military infrastructure sites in the Gaza City area,” the army said in a statement Saturday.
According to witnesses, at least four residential buildings and neighboring houses were destroyed in the airstrikes, causing several casualties. These strikes took place in the Al-Shati camp and the Daraj Tufah neighborhood in Gaza City.
The war in Gaza was sparked by a bloody attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on October 7 on Israel, resulting in the deaths of 1,194 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP count based on official data. Of 251 people kidnapped that day, 116 are still held in Gaza, 41 of whom are dead according to the army.
In response, Israel promised to annihilate Hamas, in power in Gaza since 2007 and classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union in particular. His army then launched an all-out offensive in Gaza, which has so far left 37,551 dead, mostly civilians, according to data from the Hamas government’s Health Ministry.
This offensive caused a humanitarian disaster: the population, deprived of everything, survives in extremely difficult conditions, surrounded by hermetically closed borders. International aid, essential to meet the immense needs of the population, is having difficulty arriving, deplores the World Health Organization (WHO).
A recently announced daily break by Israel on a southern route, presented as a way to facilitate the entry of aid through Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza, had “no impact”, according to the WHO. The entry of aid “has been minimal” and collecting it at Kerem Shalom is dangerous.
In the small Palestinian territory, home to some 2.4 million Palestinians, “more than a million people are constantly on the move” in the hope of finding safety when “nowhere is safe,” said Dr Thanos Gargavanis, WHO’s head of emergencies.
“We don’t see any help […] Everything we eat comes from our own money and it’s very expensive,” regrets Om Mohammad Zamlat, 66, displaced in Khan Younes (South). “Even the agencies specialized in delivering aid are not able to provide us with anything… We hope that this war will end and we will return home.”
While negotiations for a ceasefire stall, the war has caused an outbreak of violence on the Israeli-Lebanese border, where confrontations are almost daily. Exchanges of fire between the army and Hezbollah, a movement supported by Iran, have intensified recently.
In a televised address, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned Wednesday that “no place” in Israel would be spared from his movement’s missiles, after the Israeli army announced the validation of “operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon”.
On Friday, the Shiite movement claimed to have carried out attacks against border military targets. In Lebanon, media reported Israeli strikes and bombings against several locations in the south of the country.
Lebanon must not become “another Gaza”, pleaded UN boss Antonio Guterres, highlighting fears of a regional conflagration.
