RAFAH (Dispatches) -- Heavy Israeli bombardments rocked Gaza’s southern city of Rafah on Saturday, which coincided with the Western media fanfare about the first so-called humanitarian aid having entered Gaza via a U.S.-built pier.
Defying international outcry, the Zionist regime launched its so-called “limited” assault on Rafah ten days ago, but later pledged to widen the scope of its aggression.
Israeli strikes and intense clashes with Palestinian resistance fighters rocked the city late Friday and early Saturday, with reports of shelling in the city’s southeast and jets bombarding its eastern areas.
Officials at the Kuwaiti hospital said an overnight Israeli strike martyred at least two people in a displacement camp in Rafah.
Israeli bombardment of Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza also martyred at least 15 Palestinian civilians and wounded 30 others, according to Wafa news agency.
Israeli tanks bombed the entrance of a center where displaced Palestinians were sheltering in the camp, and also targeted people attempting to return to their homes in the area.
The camp has been under Israeli siege for several days now, with Palestinian families in the camp running out of food, water and medical supplies. Civil defense crews have been unable to reach the camp to retrieve bodies and tend to the wounded. 
Elsewhere on Saturday, three Palestinian civilians were killed and others wounded after Israeli strikes targeted a house belonging to the Qadeeh family, east of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Rafah, which quite recently was a shelter for more than 1.4 million Palestinian civilians, has seen some 640,000 of its inhabitants flee to other areas due to Israel’s looming full invasion, the UN humanitarian office said.
Zionist war minister Yoav Gallant said on Thursday that “additional forces will enter” the Rafah area and “this activity will intensify.”
The military wing of Hamas said Palestinians are ready for a long war of attrition, pledging to stand up to Israel’s ground invasion of Rafah and elsewhere.
“Despite our full desire to stop the aggression against our people, 

we are prepared for a long battle of attrition against the enemy, dragging them into a swamp where they will gain nothing but the death of their soldiers and the capture of their officers,” Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida said in a video message.
In the past 10 days, Palestinian fighters have targeted 100 Israeli military vehicles, including tanks, armored personnel carriers as well as bulldozers, Abu Obeida said. They have inflicted heavy casualties on Israeli soldiers by blowing up tunnels, launching rockets and mortars, and through sniping and close-quarters combat.
The Israeli military, he said, does not announce the exact figure of its losses in Gaza.
The arrival of occasional aid convoys has slowed to a trickle since Israeli forces took control last week of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing.
As the Rafah invasion intensified, the United States anchored a floating pier in Gaza on Thursday to purportedly boost aid deliveries.
According to U.S. Central Command, around 500 tonnes of aid are expected to be delivered to Gaza through the newly-built pier.
U.S. media reports said Washington was facing challenges when it came to distributing assistance to millions in need amid the war. These include a dire shortage of fuel and working in a conflict zone, they said.
Palestinians have described the temporary pier as an “occupation port”.  
They say the pier is built to strengthen Israel’s appropriation of the coast, to render the Rafah border crossing ineffective, to end Palestinian sovereignty, and to encourage the migration of the people of Gaza. 
“This is an occupation port, allowing the U.S. military entry into the borders of Gaza,” according to Palestinian political analyst Usame Abdulhadi. 
UN agencies and humanitarian aid groups have repeatedly warned that the so-called maritime corridor, and ongoing airdrops from planes, cannot replace far more efficient truck convoys into Gaza, which is facing looming famine.
The occupying regime of Israel has imposed a “complete siege” on the Gaza Strip, cutting off fuel, electricity, food, and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.
The health ministry in Gaza said Saturday that at least 35,386 people have been martyred in the territory during more than seven months of the Israeli invasion. 
The toll includes at least 83 deaths over the past 24 hours, a ministry statement said, adding that 79,366 people have been wounded in the Gaza Strip since the war began in early October. 
Israel’s Kan News cited unnamed sources as saying negotiations on a ceasefire and captive-prisoner swap between Hamas and the Zionist regime “have been stopped”.
The main sticking point was the cessation of the war in exchange for the release of captives, it said.
The sources said the gaps between the parties are very large with an emphasis on the definition of the term ‘end of the war’, and the Israeli demand for a veto on the names of resistance fighters that Hamas wants released, said the news report.
In the occupied West Bank, the Zionist military martyred a senior Palestinian fighter in an airstrike on a building in the Jenin refugee camp Friday night.
The Al-Quds Brigade, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, named the man as Islam Khamayseh. The Palestinian health ministry said that eight other Palestinians were wounded in the raid.
The Israeli military said a fighter jet and helicopter conducted the strike, a rarity in the West Bank, where Zionist air raids are usually carried out by drones.
A general strike and a day of mourning were announced in Jenin following the attack.
Israeli forces also conducted pre-dawn raids across the West Bank, kidnapping at least 20 Palestinians.
However, a former member of the Israeli spy agency on Saturday said the Zionist regime’s ongoing war in the besieged Gaza Strip is “futile”, stressing that Tel Aviv is on the losing end.
“This war lacks a clear objective, and it’s evident that we’re unequivocally losing it,” Ram Ben-Barak, a member of the Israeli parliament who served as deputy director of the Mossad, to Israeli public radio.
“We are forced to engage in fighting in the same areas and end up losing more soldiers. We’re also facing setbacks on the international stage, our relations with the US deteriorating significantly, and the Israeli economy in decline,” he said.
“Show me one thing we have succeeded in,” Ben-Barak added.
On Thursday, major general in the Israeli Reserve Army Yitzhak Brik said the current war unfolding in Gaza is a “war of attrition”. He warned that its prolongation “will lead to the collapse of the army and economy in Israel”. 
Speaking to Israeli broadcaster Channel 13, Brik said “the Israeli army needs immediate rehabilitation” as he acknowledged failure to defeat the Palestinian resistance.
Earlier Thursday, Knesset member Amit Levy said that “all 24 Hamas brigades are present [in Gaza] and not a single one of them has been destroyed”.
In addition to Hamas, the Islamic Jihad movement remains present, he said. “They lied to us that it had been eliminated,” Levy told Channel 14.
The statements come amid increasing doubts about the objectives of the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza, as troops return to the battlefield for an invasion of Rafah.