GAZA CITY (Dispatches) -- The Zionist military martyred “dozens” of civilians in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah on Tuesday in what the Palestinian health ministry described as a “new massacre”, as Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will maintain “indefinite” control over the coastal enclave.
The strike on Deir al-Balah, a heavily populated town in an area that the Zionist regime told residents of northern Gaza to move to if they wanted to stay alive, came exactly a month after the Israel-Palestine war broke out.
According to Palestinian media, the victims of the raid were mostly women and children.
Israeli airstrikes martyred 548 Palestinians in the past 24 hours, the Palestinian health ministry said on Tuesday afternoon.
This takes the death toll to 10,328 people killed since October 7, including 4,237 children, 2,719 women and 631 elderly people. At least 25,956 people have been wounded.
Around 2,450 people are still missing in Gaza, including 1,350 children. The vast majority of these people are believed to be dead and buried under rubble.
On average, a Palestinian child was martyred every 10 minutes over the past month, according to the health ministry.
The shelling has intensified during the nights and in communication blackouts, residents say, causing an unprecedented scale of destruction.
As well as a full siege imposed by Israel on October 9, which resulted in the cutting off of all water, electricity, food, aid, fuel and electricity supplies, Israeli bombing is now targeting bakeries, supermarkets, water tanks and solar panels.
On the ground, people are complaining about kidney pain, dehydration and hunger due to the lack of supplies, while surgery is still being performed without any form of anesthetic.
The non-profit Euro-Med Monitor says that the occupying regime of Israel is now “waging an extensive war of starvation against Gaza’s civilian population,” and that it has “taken very dangerous turns”.
The monitor said: “Israel has deliberately focused its attacks over the past few hours on targeting electrical generators and solar energy units, on which commercial facilities and restaurants depend to maintain the minimum possible level of their work.”
Conditions have been bleak all across the strip, with the UN agency UNRWA saying that at least 600 people are using one toilet. Elsewhere, 50,000 pregnant women need assistance as 16 out of 35 hospitals have stopped working.
The past month has also been deadly for journalists. At least 48 journalists have been killed in Gaza by the occupying regime of Israel since the start of the war, which the Committee to Protect Journalists has declared to be the deadliest period for journalists worldwide since 1992.
International media offices have also been caught up in the bombings. A photo shared by an AFP journalist on Tuesday showed the