Monitoring Desk
GAZA: Over the past 90 days, a total of 22,438 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said. At least 57,614 others have been wounded, the majority of them women and children.
Some 125 Palestinians were killed and 318 wounded in the past 24 hours, the ministry added. About 7,000 others are missing and are presumed dead under the rubble of their homes. The army said that five soldiers sustained life-threatening wounds during fighting in Gaza between yesterday and today. The injuries were mainly from battles in south Gaza, it said.
Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan says that while the assassination of Hamas’s deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri was a “shocking event” for people in Beirut, his funeral was not about exacting a call for revenge but rather “a showing of defiance and unity”. “All of the various Palestinian factions here in Lebanon came out in force,” Khan said, speaking from Beirut. “A delegation of about 20 senior Hezbollah leadership also joined them as a sign of respect and of unity.” Palestinian refugees who have lived in Lebanon’s refugee camps for several generations also showed their respects, Khan reported.
After a raid that went on for 40 hours, the Israeli army has withdrawn from the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem, the occupied West Bank. Hundreds of Palestinian men were arrested and interrogated, and at least 13 suffered broken bones after being beaten up by soldiers. Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum says that the Israeli army bombardment of the Gaza Strip has been constant. “In the past couple of hours, the Israeli military has been concentrating its attacks on the middle governorates and also in the southern part of the territory, in particular in Khan Younis, where at least 25 Palestinians have been killed,” he said, reporting from Khan Younis.
“There is a clear deployment of Israeli snipers on Salah al-Din road especially near the villages of al-Musaddar and Zawaydah, which are considered to be the main links between the middle and southern parts of Gaza,” he went on to say. “There is also ongoing artillery shelling in Maghazi and Nuseirat refugee camps. It seems that Israel is transferring from one phase of destruction to another phase, which is concentrated on the middle and southern parts of Gaza.”
Ryan Farraj, a Palestinian youth who travelled to Beirut for Saleh al-Arouri’s funeral march from the Mieh Mieh refugee camp, said many of those marching had come from far away. Carrying a Palestinian Islamic Jihad flag, he told Al Jazeera It took him two and a half hours to get to the funeral, but he said it was worth it for him “to commemorate someone who died for the Palestinian cause”.
Mohamad Ali, who came from the Ain El Helwa refugee camp, told Al Jazeera that al-Arouri set an example as a revolutionary. He added that when he grows up he wants to become a martyr for the Palestinian cause just like al-Arouri. Salma Qadoumi, 32, tells Al Jazeera that she and dozens of other people moved to Deir el-Balah after leaving the Zawaydah area, where they had been displaced for two months. “Last night, at approximately 10:00pm, we heard huge sounds of bombings, artillery shelling, and bullets firing,” she said. — Aljazeera
