As the Israeli aggression enters its 34th day, the Zionist military keeps bombing civilian populations and hospitals in the Gaza Strip with resistance forces engaging in fierce street battles with the invading troops across the besieged Palestinian enclave.
There’s no end in sight to the Israeli bloodshed in the Gaza Strip as the regime’s genocidal war on the blockaded territory continued on Thursday.
Israeli air strikes kept pounding Gaza City and other areas across the Palestinian enclave, with plumes of smoke rising from newly leveled homes and other civilian infrastructure.
In the most recent attacks, over a dozen Palestinians were killed after Israelis struck against the cities of Rafah and Deir al-Balah. At least 25 people were killed in fresh attacks on the Jabalia camp and in Khan Yunis.
Elsewhere, Israeli warplanes once again hit the vicinity of Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex.
The regime’s jets also shelled al-Nasr Children’s Hospital in Gaza City.
In the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip, a weeping father cradled the body of his two-year-old son Mohammed Abu Qamar, who died after an air strike.
“Please don’t put him in the morgue, let me take him home and I will bury him tomorrow,” his father Nidal said, as his wife screamed in grief alongside him.
The UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees and the World Health Organization (WHO) has described the condition as “disastrous,” as hospitals are overflowed with injured and hundreds of displaced Palestinians.
Tom Potokar, a chief surgeon at the International Committee of the Red Cross, described the scene at the European hospital in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza as “catastrophic.”
“In the last 24 hours, I’ve seen three patients with maggots in their wounds,” Potokar was quoted as saying.
A rare delivery of emergency medical supplies reached Gaza City’s main al-Shifa hospital on Wednesday, just the second since the war began, the UN and WHO said, warning it “far from sufficient to respond to the immense needs.”
For over a month, Gaza’s night sky has been lit by the red glow of missile flashes, delivering death and destruction to its 2.3 million residents.
Israel says it has struck at least 12,000 targets across the besieged Palestinian territory from October 7 to November 1.
Israeli strikes and shelling have been indiscriminately targeting medical facilities, schools and refugee camps. More than 10800 Palestinians, mostly women and children have been killed since Israel launched its war on Gaza.
Meanwhile, the military wing of the Hamas resistance movement, said it inflicted heavy casualties on infiltrating Israeli forces in Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected a ceasefire. The United States has backed Israel’s rejection of a ceasefire, and G7 foreign ministers in Japan on Wednesday.
In the longer term, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested the Palestinian Authority — which exercises limited autonomy only in parts of the occupied West Bank — should retake control of Gaza.
But Ezzat al-Reshq, a senior member of the Hamas resistance movement gave short shrift to the suggestion. “All the powers of the world together would not be able to impose its conditions or its puppets” on the Palestinians.
Collective punishment
Israel has told Palestinians in the heavily populated north of Gaza to move to the south.
The warning comes even as Israel has continued to bomb residential areas in both north and southern Gaza.
Israel’s repeated threats to the people in Gaza to evacuate their homes have already sparked international criticism. But the regime’s relentless bombings of the Palestinian territory have forced tens of thousands of people to flee from northern Gaza to the southern part of the besieged territory.
Aid workers have warned that many people – including the sick and wounded, as well as premature babies – cannot leave Gaza City.
At least 50,000 people fled their homes in northern Gaza on Wednesday, a sharp increase in numbers from earlier this week, adding to the more than 1.5 million people already seeking safety in the south of the coastal strip.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Thursday confirmed the figure and warned that conditions were “dire” in the north of the central Wadi Gaza district.
“Hundreds of thousands of people remaining north of Wadi Gaza, including IDPs (internally displaced people), are facing a dire humanitarian situation and are struggling to secure the minimum amounts of water and food to survive.”
The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Volker Turk strongly condemned Israel over its bombardment and its orders for to Gazans to flee.
“The collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians amounts also to a war crime, as does the unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians,” he told reporters at the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.
Turk also called out Israel for what he said was the “unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians”.
About 30% of those killed in Gaza were in the south
UN aid chief Martin Griffiths said the world body must not help push Palestinians out of their homes.
“The United Nations cannot be part of a unilateral proposal to push Palestinians into so-called safe zones,” Griffiths said.
Speaking at the conference, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) chief, Isabelle Defourny, called southern Gaza safe zones “fake zones”, and said about 30% of those killed in Gaza were in the south.
UNRWA says 99 staff killed in Gaza
UNRWA commissioner Philippe Lazzarini said 99 of the commission’s staff have been killed in Gaza since October 7.
The commissioner added that severely limiting food, water and medicine in Gaza is “collective punishment,” saying that the killing of thousands of children “cannot be collateral damage.”
He said pushing one million people to leave their homes and concentrate them in areas that lack adequate infrastructure constitutes “forced displacement.”
Belgium to be the first Western country to sanction Israel
Belgium’s deputy prime minister has called on the Belgian government to adopt sanctions against Israel and investigate the bombings of hospitals and refugee camps in Gaza.
“It is time for sanctions against Israel. The rain of bombs is inhumane,” Deputy Prime Minister Petra De Sutter told Nieuwsblad newspaper. “It is clear that Israel does not care about the international demands for a ceasefire.”
Israel conducts more deadly raids across the occupied West Bank
The Palestinian health ministry said on Thursday that at least 10 Palestinians were killed, and 16 were wounded in multiple Israeli raids on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
Witnesses in Jenin are reporting explosions, at least five in the last half hour alone, and attribute them to armed Israeli drones.
The Palestinian news outlet Quds Network posted footage of the moments after Israel bombed a house in the Jenin camp.
In the video posted to social media, smoke can be seen billowing out of a building in Jenin after it was hit by what the network says was an Israeli drone.
At least 174 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the deadly Oct. 7.
Israeli forces have arrested more than 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank in that time.
amas has condemned Israel’s deadly raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
“The occupation that suffers defeat in Gaza will also suffer defeat in Jenin and will not succeed in breaking the will of our people from Gaza to the West Bank. Resistance is a spirit that runs through us and our people, and we will continue to pursue the occupiers until victory and liberation,” the resistance group in a statement.
For its part, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group said: “The barbaric and brutal attacks on the West Bank confirm the enemy’s bankruptcy and its constant pursuit of killing to cover up its failure to achieve any gain on the ground in the Gaza Strip.”
