GAZA STRIP (Dispatches) – The Israeli military reported three rockets fired from the Gaza Strip on Friday, where Palestinian rescuers said Israeli airstrikes killed more than two dozen people, including children.
The rockets were the latest in a spate of launches by resistance fighters in the devastated Palestinian territory.
After more than 14 months of Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, such launches still continue. They have intensified since late December as Israel continues a three-month major land and air onslaught in the territory’s north.
Earlier in the day, Israel said another rocket fired from Gaza had triggered sirens near Beeri, opposite central Gaza.
In Gaza, first responders said they recovered the bodies of 26 Palestinians, several of them children.
The strikes occurred on Gaza City, the central Maghazi refugee camp and the southern city of Rafah, said Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defense.
“Friday was a harsh day for the residents of Gaza, particularly in Gaza City, due to the continuous Israeli bombardment,” he told AFP.
Several of the fatalities occurred in strikes and shelling on northern and central Gaza, and two were in the south, he said.
Three children were martyred in Israeli shelling in Gaza City’s Zietun neighborhood, while an airstrike killed two people in the southern area of Rafah, Civil Defense said.
Bassal said the Zionist military were “preventing food and drinking water from reaching dozens of medical staff, patients, and the injured” at the Indonesian Hospital in the town of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip.
He said his agency had received distress calls from the hospital since Thursday, adding that the facility is now “just a pile of rubble and walls. There’s no hospital.”
On Sunday, a United Nations aid team visited the Indonesian Hospital.
“Around me there’s nothing but rubble and destruction,” said Jonathan Whittall, a UN aid official in a video released after he visited the hospital.
A report published Tuesday by the United Nations Human Rights Office said “insufficient information” has been made available to substantiate “vague” Israeli accusations of military use of hospitals.
The Zionist army has conducted intense raids in Gaza’s north since October 6. United Nations rights experts on Monday said the north Gaza “siege” appears to be part of an effort “to permanently displace the local population as a precursor to Gaza’s annexation”.
Bassal estimated that 10,000 people remained in the northern towns of Jabalia, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun, down from between 150,000 and 200,000 before the war.
Earlier this week, war minister Israel Katz warned that Israel would step up strikes in Gaza if the rocket fire did not stop and if captives still held in the territory are not released.
Israel’s aggression has so far martyred at least 45,658 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry, figures which the United Nations considers reliable.