On Sunday, day 163 of the ongoing Israeli attack on the people of Gaza, the death toll in the Gaza Strip has risen to 31,553 martyrs, the majority of whom are children and women, since the start of the Israeli occupation aggression on the seventh of last October, and the death toll has reached 73,546 since the beginning of the aggression, while thousands of victims are still under the rubble.
Medical sources announced that the Israeli occupation forces committed 7 massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, resulting in the death of 63 citizens and the injury of 112 others, during the past 24 hours, noting that a number of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them.
Also Sunday, Israeli authorities revised the official death toll from the October 7th terror attack against Israeli military and civilians to 1,147 (fewer than the previous estimate of 1400 killed).
591 Israeli soldiers have been killed by the Palestinian resistance since October 7, and at least 3,221 injured.
On Sunday morning, Netanyahu told ministers in the “war cabinet” that the army “will operate in Rafah. This is the only way to eliminate the rest of Hamas’s murderous battalions, and this is the only way to apply the military pressure necessary to release all our abductees.”
Mondoweiss reported that Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the chief of the World Health Organization (WHO), said on Saturday evening that “further escalation of violence in this densely populated area would lead to many more deaths and suffering, especially with health facilities already overwhelmed.”
Ghebreyesus added that the 1.2 million Palestinians in Rafah “do not have anywhere safe to move to” and that they cannot reach fully functioning health facilities in the Gaza Strip, as most of them are partially operational or out of service due to Israeli aggression.
“Many people are too fragile, hungry, and sick to be moved again,” Ghebreyesus wrote on X.
A number of Palestinians, most of them children and women, were killed at dawn on Sunday, after Israeli occupation aircraft bombed a house in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
Medical sources announced that at least 11 citizens, most of them children and women, were killed, and a number of others were injured, as a result of the occupation aircraft bombing a house for the Thabet family in the Bishara neighborhood in the center of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
Mondoweiss reported Israel has continued its aerial campaign on the Gaza Strip, bombing several areas across the besieged enclave overnight. In Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, an Israeli airstrike on a house of the Thabet family in the Bishara neighborhood killed at least 11 people, Wafa news agency reported.
Israeli forces also bombed the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis, north of Rafah, and Gaza City’s Al-Shejaiya neighborhood in the north.
In al-Zahraa City in north Gaza, footage of armed clashes between Palestinian resistance fighters and Israeli forces were released by the Hamas armed wing Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades. Palestinian fighters shot several Israeli tanks and armored vehicles with Al-Yaseen 105mm anti-tank shells.
Al-Zahraa is a highly symbolic city as it was built in 1997 in response to Israel’s plan to build an illegal settlement on Abu Ghoneim mount near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank.
It is among the first and few projects built by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the Gaza Strip as hopes ran high for establishing a Palestinian state in the 1990s. It is located south of Gaza City and is the home for the supreme court, two universities and several municipal departments.
Armed clashes escalated in the past week as Israel is finishing building a fortified highway, south of Al-Zahraa City, which now reaches to the Mediterranean coast. The corridor will split the Gaza Strip into two, between the north and south, and would further cement Israeli military control in the Strip and restrict the movement of Palestinians and the ability of Gazans to return to their homes in the north.
