GAZA (AFP): The death toll in the Gaza Strip has risen to at least 1,354, the Hamas health ministry said, with dozens killed since Thursday morning following a massive Israeli bombardment of the enclave.
At least “1,354 citizens have been martyred and 6,049 suffered various injuries”, the ministry said, updating an earlier death toll of around 1,200 that was announced at dawn on Thursday.
More than 338,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in the Gaza Strip, the United Nations said, as heavy Israeli bombardments continue to hit the Palestinian enclave.
“Mass displacement across the Gaza Strip continues,” the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said in a statement sent on Thursday.
By late Wednesday, the number of displaced people in Gaza had risen by an additional 75,000 people from the figure given 24 hours earlier, reaching 338,934, it said.
The announcement came as Israel pounded Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip — a densely populated enclave of 2.3 million people — in response to the militants’ surprise Saturday attack.
Israeli forces said 1,300 people, most of them civilians, were killed in the onslaught — the worst in the country’s history.
OCHA said nearly 220,000 people, or two-thirds of the displaced people, have sought shelter in schools run by the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
Another nearly 15,000 people fled to schools run by the Palestinian Authority, while more than 100,000 were being sheltered by relatives, neighbours and a church and other facilities in Gaza City.
OCHA said that around 3,000 people had already been displaced within the enclave prior to Saturday’s attack.
The bombing campaign has destroyed or rendered uninhabitable at least 2,540 housing units in Gaza, OCHA said, citing numbers from the Gaza Ministry of Public Works and Housing.
Another 22,850 housing units sustained moderate to minor damage, it said.
The UN agency also voiced alarm at the significant destruction of civilian infrastructure damaged in the shelling.
Among other things, it said sewage facilities serving more than a million people had been hit by air strikes, leaving solid waste accumulating in the streets, posing a health threat.
Meanwhile, Israel hit Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip for the fifth straight day since the militants’ audacious attack and the death toll spiralled into the thousands, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed the complete destruction of the Palestinian group.
“Every Hamas member is a dead man,” the veteran right-wing Israeli leader said, again likening them to the Islamic State group and promising: “We will crush them and destroy them as the world has destroyed Daesh.”
Netanyahu earlier temporarily settled his political differences and set up an emergency government including centrist former defence minister Benny Gantz for the duration of the crisis.
Saturday’s surprise attack — the worst in Israel’s 75-year history — has seen a total of 1,200 people killed in the onslaught, according to Israeli forces. Most were civilians.
The United Nations said 11 of its staff had been killed in Gaza since Saturday, while the International Red Cross and Red Crescent societies said it had lost five of its members.
In the occupied West Bank, at least four Palestinians were killed when armed Israeli settlers attacked a town south of Nablus, taking the death toll to 29, the Palestinian health ministry said.
Israel has massed forces, tanks and other heavy armour around Gaza in its retaliatory operation against what Netanyahu labelled “an attack whose savagery… we have not seen since the Holocaust”.
US President Joe Biden pledged to send more munitions and military hardware to its close ally Israel and expressed revulsion at the “sheer evil” of the slaughter of civilians in Hamas’s unprecedented assault.
Biden also made his first call for restraint over Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks, urging Israel to abide by the rules of war.
He said he had told Netanyahu it was “really important that Israel, with all the anger and frustration… they operate by the rules of war”.
The crisis, dubbed “Israel’s 9/11”, saw Netanyahu strike a political deal with Gantz and pledge to freeze for now his government’s judicial overhaul plan that has sparked unprecedented mass protests.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid has not joined the temporary alliance, although the joint statement said a seat would be “reserved” for him in the war cabinet.
“Israel before anything else,” Gantz wrote in a social media post, while the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote that he “welcomes the unity, now we must win”.
– Fears for hostages –
As the war raged on, fears mounted in Israel over the fate of at least 150 hostages — mostly Israelis but also including foreign and dual nationals — held in Gaza by Hamas.
The group has claimed that four captives died in Israeli strikes and threatened to kill other hostages if civilian targets are bombed without advance warning from Israel.
Hamas claimed Wednesday to have released an Israeli woman and her two children it said had been detained during fighting with Israeli forces, but Israeli television networks rejected the announcement.
Concern rose over the worsening humanitarian crisis in war-torn Gaza, where Israel had levelled over 1,000 buildings and imposed a total siege, cutting off water, food and energy supplies for 2.3 million people.
The enclave’s sole power plant shut down Wednesday after running out of fuel, Gaza’s electricity provider said.
The European Union called for a “humanitarian corridor” to allow civilians to flee the enclave’s fifth war in 15 years.
Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Cairo called for aid to be allowed into Gaza “immediately”.
Israel appeared to be readying for a possible ground invasion of Gaza, but faces the threat of a multi-front war after also coming under rocket attack from militant groups in neighbouring Lebanon and Syria.
Israel again struck targets Wednesday in southern Lebanon, an area controlled by the Iran-backed Hezbollah.
On Wednesday evening, rocket sirens sounded across Israel’s north, and the army said there was a suspected aerial “infiltration” from Lebanon. It later backtracked, blaming an “error”.
Biden, who has diverted an aircraft carrier battle group to the eastern Mediterranean, has warned Israel’s enemies — state or group — not to get involved.
He urged Iran, which has long financially and militarily backed Hamas but insists it had no involvement in Saturday’s assault, to “be careful”.
A first US aircraft has delivered “advanced armaments” to southern Israel’s Nevatim Airbase, the Israeli army said.
– ‘Staggering’ death toll –
Israel has been badly shaken by the deadliest attack since its creation in 1948 and the intelligence failure that allowed more than 1,500 militants to storm through the Gaza security barrier in their coordinated land, air and sea attack on the Jewish Sabbath.
Hamas gunmen swept into small towns and kibbutzim and indiscriminately killed residents who hid in their homes or died defending their communities.
Biden on Tuesday expressed his disgust at atrocities including murders of entire families, rapes of women and “stomach-turning reports of babies being killed”.
The US State Department said at least 22 US citizens had been killed, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken headed to Israel in a show of solidarity.
Israeli forces have retaken more than a dozen southern towns near Gaza after days of gruelling street battles that have left the bodies of at least 1,500 Hamas militants strewn in the streets.
Army spokesman Jonathan Conricus said they had discovered “a staggering 1,200 dead Israelis” — most of them civilians — as they went house to house.
The army later reported 169 fallen Israeli soldiers.
Troops have encountered and killed several holdout Hamas militants, said Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari, including 18 on Wednesday.
The Israeli army has called up 300,000 reservists for what Netanyahu has said will be a “long and difficult” war.
Israel’s intelligence minister Gila Gamliel told AFP the war to “uproot” Hamas will deter militants from carrying out attacks across the world.
– ‘In a ghost town’ –
Heavy bombardment again rained down on Gaza, where the sky was blackened and Hamas said at least 30 people were killed in overnight strikes.
Rubble, burnt out cars and broken glass covered roads in Gaza City, where bombs struck the Hamas-linked Islamic University.
Also targeted were residential buildings, mosques, factories and shops, said Salama Marouf of the Gaza government’s media office.
Gaza resident Mazen Mohammad, 38, said his terrified family had spent the night huddled together as explosions shook the area, before emerging in the morning to assess the total devastation of their neighbourhood.
“We felt like we were in a ghost town, as if we were the only survivors,” Mohammad told AFP.
Medical supplies, including oxygen, were running low at Gaza’s overwhelmed Al-Shifa hospital, said emergency room physician Mohammed Ghonim.
– Fear and distrust –
Unrest has flared in the occupied West Bank, where protests have been held in solidarity with Gaza and 27 Palestinians have been killed in clashes since Saturday.
Israeli cities have been eerily quiet and tense, with some residents noting a growing sense of fear and distrust between Jews and members of the Arab-Israeli minority.
Frantic diplomacy has continued as international and regional powers sought to prevent a wider conflagration in the Middle East.
Blinken visits Israel to stress US support
Israel and Hamas traded more heavy fire Thursday in the Gaza war that has killed thousands as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited to stress strong solidarity but also urge restraint to protect Palestinian civilians.
US President Joe Biden — who has expressed his revulsion at the atrocities, strongly backed Israel and started sending military aid — also cautioned on Wednesday that Israel must, despite “all the anger and frustration … operate by the rules of war”.
The United States has deployed an aircraft carrier battle group to the eastern Mediterranean in a show of support and warned Israel’s other enemies not to enter the conflict.
Blinken was on Friday due to visit Jordan and meet King Abdullah II as well as the president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmud Abbas.
Unrest has also flared in the occupied West Bank, where protests have been held in solidarity with Gaza and 27 Palestinians have been killed in clashes since Saturday.
