Despite growing hopes of a ceasefire, the violence continues in the Gaza Strip, where 35 people have been killed in the last 24 hours according to the Civil Defence of the Palestinian territory, ravaged by more than a year of war between Hamas and Israel.
The Islamist movement Hamas and two other Palestinian groups had suggested on Saturday that an agreement on a truce in Gaza was ‘closer than ever’.
Meanwhile, the fighting continues unabated along the Palestinian coastal strip, which has been hit in several places in the space of a few hours by Israeli army air strikes.
On Saturday night, one of these strikes targeted a school building housing displaced persons in the northern city of Gaza, killing eight people, including four children, the Civil Defence told AFP.
Residents were busy on Sunday morning, amid the blood-stained rubble of the Moussa Ben Nousseir school, trying to salvage any belongings that could still be used.
‘A big explosion and screams woke us up,’ one of them, Abu Ali al-Jamal, told AFP. ‘We found women and children torn apart and pieces of flesh everywhere.’
The Israeli army said it had carried out ‘a targeted strike against Hamas terrorists who were operating’ within the establishment ‘to prepare terrorist attacks against Israeli troops and the State of Israel’.
‘Multiple measures had been taken beforehand to reduce the risk of hitting civilians’, she added.
According to the Civil Defence, another strike, targeting a family home in Deir al-Balah (centre), killed 13 people.
Wrapped in blankets, two bodies lay on the dusty ground as residents searched the rubble in the rising sun for any survivors.
‘We lose loved ones every day,’ Naïm al-Ramlawi told AFP. ‘I pray to God that there will be a truce soon and that a solution will be found so that we can live normally.’
The Israeli army said it had targeted a terrorist from Islamic Jihad, another armed Palestinian movement in the Gaza Strip, ‘on the basis of intelligence’, and that the figure of 13 dead did not correspond to the information available to it.
Gazan rescue workers also reported three ‘unidentified’ deaths in a strike near Rafah (south), and four others in Gaza City in a drone attack confirmed to AFP by an Israeli security source.
By Sunday evening, the death toll had risen to seven, according to the Civil Defence, in a refugee camp in Khan Younès (south), where the Israeli army said it had targeted ‘a Hamas terrorist’.
This new violence prompted Pope Francis to condemn for the second time in two days the ‘cruelty’ of the strikes against Gaza, despite protests from Israeli diplomats, who had accused him the previous day of applying ‘double standards’.
‘It is with pain that I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of children being machine-gunned, of schools and hospitals being bombed’, he said at the end of the Sunday Angelus prayer.
The director of the Kamal Adwan hospital, one of only two still operating in the Gaza Strip, said on Sunday that the generators powering his establishment had been hit.
‘The army is trying to target the fuel tank, which poses a major risk of fire’, said Hossam Abou Safia. Contacted by AFP, the Israeli army denied any strike on the hospital.
Israel also strictly controls the arrival of international aid, which is vital for the 2.4 million Gazans, and has been accused on several occasions of committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza, including before the international courts at the instigation of South Africa -- accusations that the Israeli authorities strongly reject.
‘Of the 34 trucks carrying food and water that have been allowed into the northern governorate of Gaza over the past two and a half months, deliberate delays and systematic obstruction by the Israeli army have meant that only 12 have managed to deliver aid to starving Palestinian civilians,’ the NGO Oxfam said in a statement on Sunday, sounding the alarm about the deteriorating situation in the besieged Palestinian territory.
The war was triggered by the unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people on the Israeli side, the majority of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures and including hostages who died or were killed in captivity in the Gaza Strip.
On that day, 251 people were kidnapped on Israeli soil, 96 of whom remain hostages in Gaza, including 34 declared dead by the army.
According to the latest figures released on Sunday by the local health authorities, 45,259 people, the majority of them civilians, have been killed in Gaza in the Israeli military campaign of reprisals since 7 October, figures deemed reliable by the UN.
With AFP.
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