Israeli forces thrust deeper into Jabalia in northern Gaza yesterday, striking a hospital and destroying residential areas with tank and air bombardments, residents said, while Israeli air strikes killed at least five people in Rafah in the south.
Simultaneous Israeli assaults on the northern and southern edges of the Gaza Strip this month have caused a new exodus of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing their homes, and sharply restricted the flow of aid, raising the risk of famine.
In Jabalia, a sprawling refugee camp built for displaced civilians 75 years ago, the Israeli army used bulldozers to clear shops and property near the local market, residents said, in a military operation that began almost two weeks ago.
Israel said it has returned to the camp, where it had claimed to have dismantled Hamas months ago, to prevent the group that controls Gaza from regrouping.
In a roundup of its activity over the past day, the Israeli military said it had dismantled ‘about 70 targets’ throughout the Gaza Strip, including military compounds, weapon storage sites, missile launchers and observation posts.
Residents and medics said Israeli tanks were besieging another Jabalia hospital, Al Awda Hospital, for the third day. In Geneva, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said northern Gaza’s sick and wounded were running out of options.
More than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war in Gaza, which is now in its eighth month, according to the Gaza health ministry. At least 10,000 others are missing and believed to be trapped under destroyed buildings, it says.
The war has devastated the overcrowded coastal enclave, destroying houses, schools and hospitals and creating a dire humanitarian crisis.
Aid from a US-built pier resumed moving into warehouses in Gaza yesterday using alternative routes, the Pentagon said. The distribution was halted for three days after crowds of needy residents intercepted trucks.
In the south, air strikes killed three children in a house in Khan Younis and at least five people including three children in a home in Rafah, health officials said.
East of Khan Younis, residents said they were fleeing Khuzaa town after Israeli troops began an incursion on the eastern edge of the territory, bulldozing across the border fence.
“Bombing everywhere, people are leaving in panic. It was a surprising incursion,” one resident from Khuzaa said as he and his family were leaving.
Israel is pushing on with its operations in Rafah on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, where more than half of the territory’s 2.3 million population had sought refuge after being displaced from areas further north.
UNRWA, the main United Nations agency in Gaza, estimated as of Monday that more 800,000 had fled since Israel began targeting the city in early May, despite international pleas for restraint over concern about civilian casualties.
Yesterday, the agency said food distributions had been suspended in Rafah due to lack of supplies and insecurity.
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