Israeli army fires an artillery round into Gaza Strip
New Delhi:
Thousands of Palestinians sought refuge on Saturday after Israel warned them to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip before an expected ground offensive against Hamas, one week on from the deadliest terror attack in Israeli history.
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The Hamas group gunned down, stabbed and burned more than 1,300 people in the attack that Israel has compared to 9/11 in the US, sparking a massive retaliatory bombing campaign targeting the group that has killed over 2,200 in Gaza.
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Alarm has grown over the fate of Palestinian civilians in blockaded and besieged Gaza — one of the world’s most densely populated areas, home to over 20 lakh people — if it becomes the scene of intense urban combat and house-to-house fighting.
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Some 1.1 million people live in the north of Gaza, and aid agencies have said forcing them to move is an impossibility as the war rages, and as supplies of food, fuel and medicines run low.
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Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh accused Israel today of committing “war crimes” in Gaza and stopping humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the situation in Gaza as “a dangerous new low”.
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Israel, which has vowed to destroy Hamas, has massed ground forces and tanks around Gaza, and dropped leaflets telling civilians to flee the north of the enclave. “Localised” raids have been carried out “to cleanse the area of terrorists and weaponry”, the army said.
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The raids have also sought to locate “missing persons” inside Gaza, the military said, after Hamas took some 150 hostages whose families have watched the escalating war with growing terror.
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The Hamas attack and the war it sparked — Gaza’s fifth in 15 years — have upended Middle Eastern politics. Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza, while clashes in the occupied West Bank have killed 53 Palestinians in the past week.
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But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokeswoman Tal Heinrich told news agency AFP, “Everything that happens in Gaza is Hamas’s responsibility.” The US has voiced strong support for Israel and sent military aid, while the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been on a regional tour aiming to keep calm in the Arab world.
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Israel faces the threat of a separate confrontation in the north, with the Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, after cross-border violence repeatedly erupted for days. A Reuters video journalist was killed and six other reporters — from AFP, Reuters and Al Jazeera — were wounded in southern Lebanon close to Israel, caught up in cross-border shelling.
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Israeli forces said today they had killed several “terrorists” trying to cross the border and also “struck a Hezbollah terror target in southern Lebanon” in response to a drone crossing the border.
With inputs from AFP
