Jerusalem — Israeli forces on Thursday heavily bombed the besieged Gaza Strip as the center of fierce combat against Hamas moves steadily south, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are sheltering.
The war, which started with Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, has devastated much of northern Gaza as air and artillery strikes and house-to-house fighting have become heaviest in the southern city of Khan Yunis.
Ashraf al-Qudra, spokesman for the health ministry in Gaza, reported more than 200 deaths “including entire families” over the past 24 hours in strikes across the territory.
An AFP correspondent reported heavy artillery strikes overnight particularly on Khan Yunis.
The Israeli army has deployed an additional brigade to Khan Yunis, the hometown of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, said military spokesman Daniel Hagari.
More than 80 percents of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been driven from their homes, the UN says, and many now live in cramped shelters or makeshift tents in the far south, in and around the city of Rafah near Egypt.
UN World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for “urgent steps to alleviate the grave peril” facing Gaza’s people, including “terrible injuries, acute hunger and… severe risk of disease”.
French President Emmanuel Macron in a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced his “deepest concern at the very heavy civilian toll” and stressed “the need to work towards a lasting ceasefire”, Macron’s office said.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas in retaliation for its October 7 attack, which left about 1,140 people dead, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
The Palestinian militants also took around 250 hostages, 129 of whom remain in captivity.
Israel’s relentless aerial bombardment and ground invasion with troops and tanks have killed at least 21,320 people, mostly women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
The Israeli army says 167 of its soldiers have been killed inside Gaza.
Quadruplets born in war
An Israeli siege imposed in the wake of the October 7 attack — following years of crippling blockade — has deprived Gazans of food, water, fuel and medicine.
The severe shortages have only been sporadically eased by humanitarian aid convoys entering primarily via Egypt.
“We are tired of everything,” said Ekhlas Shnenou who fled her Gaza City home. “Enough with the war, enough with the pain, enough with the hunger.”
One of the many people displaced, 28-year-old Iman al-Masry, recently gave birth to quadruplets in a hospital in southern Gaza after fleeing her family’s home in the devastated north.
The arduous journey “affected my pregnancy”, she said, recounting that she gave birth by C-section on December 18 to two girls and two boys, one of whom was too fragile to leave hospital.
“They are very slim,” she said of the three other infants, speaking in a schoolroom turned shelter in Deir al-Balah. “It’s cold and windy and there’s no bathtub… I just use wipes.”
The Palestinian Red Crescent society reported fresh shelling Thursday near Al-Amal hospital in Khan Yunis, killing at least 10 people.
It decried in a statement the “intensification” of Israeli strikes in the area of the facility, already hit earlier this week, where about 14,000 Palestinians are sheltering.
Violence has also flared across the Israel-occupied West Bank, with at least 314 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces or settlers since October 7, according to the territory’s health ministry.
Israeli forces overnight raided money exchange shops across the West Bank which the military said had provided funds for armed groups.
In Ramallah, seat of the Palestinian Authority, one man was killed by the troops, according to the health ministry. An AFP journalist saw Palestinians hurl Molotov cocktails at the Israeli forces.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and regularly carries out raids there, though they are far less common in the territory’s institutional heart Ramallah.
A United Nations report Thursday said the human rights situation in the West Bank was rapidly deteriorating and urged Israel to “end unlawful killings” against the Palestinian population.
“The use of military tactics and weapons in law enforcement contexts, the use of unnecessary or disproportionate force, and the enforcement of broad, arbitrary and discriminatory movement restrictions that affect Palestinians are extremely troubling,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said in a statement.
Mideast tensions flare
The bloodiest ever Gaza war has also sharply heightened tensions between Israel and its long-time arch foe Iran, which supports armed groups across the Middle East.
Iran blamed Israel for a missile strike in Syria on Monday that killed the senior Iranian military commander Razi Moussavi, who was laid to rest at a tearful mass funeral in Tehran on Thursday.
The crowd chanted “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” after supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei led a prayer over the body of Moussavi, a top commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign operations arms the Quds Force.
Tehran has vowed to avenge the death of Moussavi, the most senior Guards general killed since the US assassination of Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani in 2020.
Israel has traded heavy cross-border fire with Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon since the Gaza war broke out and warned it will step up military action unless the group’s militants withdraw further away from the border.
The army on Thursday said it intercepted a drone that crossed in from Lebanon over northern Israel, a day after a drone crashed in the annexed Golan Heights.
Another Iran ally, Yemen’s Houthi rebel group, has launched repeated drone and missile attacks at Israel, which have been intercepted in the air, and fired at passing cargo ships in the Red Sea, disrupting international trade.