After Failure of Forced Expulsion Project,

Israel Turns to Bunker Busters to Massacre Gazans

Date: 14 May 2025 - 23:10

News ID: ۱۳۹۵۸۵

GAZA STRIP (Dispatches) -- Israeli military strikes martyred at least 80 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, local health authorities said, in an intensification of the bombardment as U.S. President Donald Trump visits West Asia.
Medics said most of the dead, including women and children, were killed in a barrage of Israeli airstrikes on houses in the Jabalia area of northern Gaza.
“Some victims are still on the road and under the rubble where rescue and civil emergency teams can’t reach (them),” the health ministry statement said.
Footage from the aftermath of a strike in Jabalia showed mounds of rubble and twisted metal from collapsed buildings. Palestinians, including young children, picked through the debris in search of belongings.
Footage of mourners in northern Gaza showed women in tears as they kneeled next to bodies wrapped in bloodstained white shrouds. “It’s a nine-month-old baby. What did he do?” one of them cried out.
“They fired two rockets, they told us the house of Moqbel (had been hit),” said Hadi Moqbel, who lost relatives in the attack in Jabalia. “We came running, we saw body parts on the ground, children killed, the woman killed and a baby killed - his head was exploded like a flower. He was two months old.”
The massacres in northern Gaza came after a series of powerful Israeli strikes in the vicinity of the European Hospital in south Gaza’s Khan Yunis late Tuesday, killing at least 28 people.
Yedioth Ahronoth reported that at least 40 bunker buster bombs were used in the strike to allegedly destroy an underground complex belonging to the Palestinian resistance and assassinating top Hamas leader Muhammad Sinwar – the younger brother of the former Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.
The Gaza civil defense said in a short statement that the bodies of some of the victims could not be recovered because they were “scattered around the hospital area” from the intensity of the Israeli bombardment.
After reports indicated a second round of Israeli missiles hit the area to deter rescue operations, the agency confirmed the Israeli army “deliberately targeted anyone who tried to reach” the wounded.
BBC reported that the strikes resulted in several deep craters inside the hospital compound, which buried several vehicles, including part of a large bus.
Eyewitnesses said Israeli drones maintained a tight aerial siege over the building, preventing rescue teams from reaching the site.
Hamas said on Wednesday the continued attacks indicated that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to “escalate the aggression and massacres against civilians to undermine those (ceasefire) efforts”.
The ferocious aggression came after the release of Israeli-American Edan Alexander, who had been in Hamas captivity since October 2023, offered a brief pause in the war on Gaza on Monday.
But the strikes resumed amid fierce new criticism of Israel’s tactics in the war.
“In the very coming days, we are going in with full force to complete the operation,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying in a statement released on Tuesday.
His remarks came after UN relief chief Tom Fletcher called on the UN Security Council to take action “to prevent genocide” in Gaza as he gave a scathing account of Israel’s aggression in the territory.
“Will you act -- decisively -- to prevent genocide and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law?” he said to UN ambassadors in New York.
Late Tuesday, the Israeli military urged civilians in several parts of northern Gaza to evacuate after “two projectiles” were fired from the territory. The armed wing of Hamas ally Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for rocket fire into the Israeli occupied territories.
Israel resumed intensified aggression across Gaza on March 18 in violation of a January 19 ceasefire.
The Israeli regime this month approved plans to expand its onslaught, with officials talking

of retaining a long-term presence in Gaza.

Netanyahu said late Monday that Israel was working to find countries willing to take in Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.

Israeli ministers have seized on a proposal initially floated by Trump for relocating Gazans to neighboring countries such as Jordan or Egypt, which have flatly rejected the proposal.

Since the Israeli military broke the two-month ceasefire agreement with Hamas in mid-March, the occupying entity has blocked the entry of all humanitarian aid, including medicine, fuel, and food supplies into Gaza. Dozens of people, mostly children, have died from starvation.

In Paris, President Emmanuel Macron said in critical remarks not typical of France that Netanyahu’s actions in blocking aid to Gaza were “shameful”.

Meanwhile, Russia, China and the UK rejected Israel’s plans for distributing aid in Gaza, instead urging Tel Aviv to lift its two-month blockade on the territory.

Nearly all of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has been displaced, often multiple times, since the regime launched its genocidal war on the territory in October 2023.

Over 52,900 Palestinians have been martyred in Gaza in the brutal Israeli onslaught since October 2023, most of them women and children.

However, many estimates of the death toll in the strip are much higher than the number documented by the Gaza health ministry.

The Israeli military has admitted that more than 80 percent of those killed in the attacks on Gaza since Israel breached the ceasefire two months ago are uninvolved civilians, Hebrew magazine Hamakom reported.

According to the Euro-Med Monitor, for every Palestinian resistance fighter killed, 14 civilians have been killed – many of them women and children.