Shameless Gaza Genocide Intensifies

Date: 24 October 2023 - 21:57

News ID: ۱۲۰۷۰۰

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (Dispatches) -- Rapidly expanding Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip martyred more than 700 people in the past day as medical facilities across the territory were forced to close because of bombing damage and a lack of power, health officials said Tuesday.
The soaring death toll from the Zionist regime’s escalating brutal bombardment was unprecedented in the decades-long aggression. It could signal an even greater loss of life in Gaza once Israeli ground forces backed by tanks and artillery launch an invasion into the territory.
Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been under the most ruthless bombardment and running out of food, water and medicine since Israel sealed off the territory following the Oct. 7 surprise operation by Hamas on towns in southern Occupied Palestine.
On Tuesday, Israel said it had launched 400 airstrikes over the past day. The previous day, the Zionist regime reported 320 strikes. Witnesses and health officials said many of the airstrikes hit residential buildings, some of them in southern Gaza.
An overnight strike hit a four-story residential building in the southern city of Khan Younis, martyring at least 32 people and wounding scores of others, according to survivors.
The fatalities included 13 from the Saqallah family, said Ammar al-Butta, a relative who survived the airstrike. He said there were about 100 people there, including many who had come from Gaza City, which Israel has ordered civilians to evacuate.
“They were sheltering at our home because we thought that our area would be safe. But apparently there is no safe place in Gaza,” he said.
Another airstrike hit a bustling marketplace in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, martyring several shoppers and wounding dozens, witnesses said.
Men used sledgehammers to break up concrete and dug with their bare hands through the jagged wreckage to save anyone they could – or at least recover the dead who had been buying meat and vegetables when the explosion hit.
A man buried up to his chest in rubble looked up at his rescuers with wide eyes, his face coated in dust from the blast. An oxygen mask was placed on his face as they spent 15 minutes working to free him.
Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry said the attacks martyred at least 704 people over the past day, including 305 children and 173 women. More than 5,700 Palestinians have been martyred in the war on Gaza, including some 2,300 minors, the ministry said, without giving a detailed breakdown. The figure includes the toll from an explosion at a hospital last week.
Most of the Palestinians martyred since Oct. 7 were in the north and central areas of the enclave that Israel had told them evacuate, the ministry said.
The fighting has killed more than 1,400 Zionists.
As the death toll in Gaza spiraled, facilities to deal with the casualties were dwindling. A total of 46 out of 72 primary healthcare facilities, and 12 out of 35 hospitals, stopped functioning, the World Health Organization said. Palestinian health officials said the lack of electricity and fuel to power generators from the Israeli blockade, as well as damage from airstrikes, has forced many of the facilities to close.
Gaza’s five main hospitals were all filled beyond capacity, it said.
The rising toll has made it hard for Palestinians to bury the huge numbers of dead, with cemeteries being forced to excavate and reuse old plots and bury up to five bodies in one grave.
“Bodies pour in by the hundreds every day. We use every empty inch in the cemeteries,” said Abdel Rahman Mohamed, a volunteer who helps transfer bodies to Khan Younis’ main cemetery. “Some bodies arrive in pieces in bags. It’s horrible.”
Palestinian resistance groups have fired over 7,000 rockets at Zionist targets since the start of the war, Israel said, and Hamas said it fired a new barrage Tuesday morning.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said six of its staff were killed in bombings, bringing to 35 the death toll of its workers since the war started.
Amid fears the fighting to spiral into a wider regional war, French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Tel Aviv on Tuesday and told top Israeli officials that he came “to express our support and solidarity and share your pain” as well as to assure Israel it is “not left alone in the war.”
In a joint news conference with extremist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Macron stressed what he called Israel’s right to defend itself.
On Monday, Hamas released two elderly Israeli women who were among the more than 200 people Israel says were taken to Gaza during the attack.
Appearing weak in a wheelchair and speaking softly, 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz told reporters Tuesday that her captors treated “gently” and gave her food as well as medical treatment.
The people assigned to guard her “told us they are people who believe in the Qur’an and wouldn’t hurt us.” Lifshitz said conditions were kept clean, she received medical care, including medication, and was given the same one meal a day of cheese and cucumber that her captors had.
Lifshitz and 79-year-old Nurit Cooper were freed days after an American woman and her teenage daughter were released. Hamas and other fighters in Gaza are believed to have taken roughly 220 Zionists, including an unconfirmed number of foreigners and dual citizens.
Zionist authorities were furious. Sources told Israel’s regime-owned Kan News that the interview was a “mistake”.
A 25-year-old Palestinian detainee died in Israel’s Ofer prison on Tuesday, the prison authority said. The Palestinian Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs Commission identified him as Arafat Hamdan.
Hamdan, who is from the town of Beit Sira in the northern occupied West Bank, had been arrested on Sunday.
“The occupation has begun a systematic assassination operation against prisoners amid a total aggression campaign against our people,” the commission said.
On Monday, Palestinian prisoner Omar Darghmeh, who Hamas claimed as a member, died in prison under unclear circumstances.
The Israeli military later dropped leaflets in Gaza asking Palestinians to reveal information on the hostages’ whereabouts. In exchange, the military promised a reward and protection for the informant’s home.
The occupying regime was also furious after UN chief Antonio Guterres has said that attacks by Hamas “did not happen in a vacuum”.
“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation,” Guterres told a session of the UN Security Council.
“They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements, plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced, and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
The remarks drew a furious reaction Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN.
Israel’s pounding of the Gaza Strip has had a “catastrophic” impact on healthcare facilities, according to healthcare officials.
International organizations have also warned about the spread of water-borne diseases and scabies due to a lack of clean water in the Strip.
Heavy Israeli shelling landed close to the Al-Amal hospital in Gaza’s Khan Younis on Monday, video footage shared by the Palestine Red Crescent Society showed.
An Israeli airstrike also struck near the Al-Wafa hospital. The full extent of the damage is still being assessed.
At least 25 ambulances in the besieged enclave have been destroyed, according to the Ministry of Health.
The Zionist regime’s bombing of the al-Ahli al-Arab Hospital, which martyred at least 500 Palestinians, has left it out of service. The hospital was treating hundreds of patients.