Israeli military strikes killed at least 30 Palestinians overnight in the Gaza Strip, most of them in the Nuseirat camp at the centre of the enclave, medics said on Friday, after some tanks pulled back from an area they had raided.
Medics said they had recovered 19 bodies of Palestinians killed in northern areas of Nuseirat, one of the enclave’s eight long-standing refugee camps.
The rest were killed in the northern and southern areas of the Gaza Strip, medics added. There was no fresh statement by the Israeli military on Friday, but on Thursday it said its forces were continuing to “strike terror targets as part of the operational activity in the Gaza Strip”.
Some Israeli tanks remained active in the western area of the camp and the Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said teams were unable to respond to distress calls from residents trapped inside their houses.
Dozens of Palestinians returned on Friday to areas where the army had retreated to check on damage to their homes. Some retrieved bodies of the dead.
Medics and relatives covered up dead bodies, including of women, that lay on the road with blankets or white shrouds and carried them away on stretchers.
“Forgive me, my wife, forgive me, my Ibtissam, forgive me, my dear,” one grief-stricken man groaned through tears beside her corpse, laid out on a stretcher on the ground.
Medics said an Israeli drone on Friday had killed Ahmed Al-Kahlout, head of the Intensive Care Unit at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip, where the army has been operating since early October.
Al-Kahlout was killed by a missile fired from the drone as he walked through the hospital gate, two medical officials at Kamal Adwan Hospital told Reuters. Earlier in the week, the director of the hospital and 12 other medics were wounded in similar attacks, the Gaza health ministry said.
There was no immediate Israeli army comment.
Kamal Adwan Hospital is one of three medical facilities on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip that are now barely operational due to shortages of medical, fuel, and food supplies. Health officials said most of its medical staff had been either detained or expelled by the Israeli army.
DISPLACEMENTS
The Israeli army said forces operating in Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun and Jabalia since Oct. 5 aimed to prevent Hamas militants from regrouping and waging attacks from those areas. Residents said the army was depopulating the towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun as well as the Jabalia refugee camp.
The head of the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, said on Thursday Israel’s seven-week offensive in the northern edge of Gaza had uprooted some 130,000 people.
Meanwhile, Israeli authorities released around 30 Palestinians whom it had detained in the past few months during its Gaza offensive. Those released arrived at a hospital in southern Gaza for medical checkups, medics said.
Freed Palestinians, detained during the war, have complained of ill-treatment and torture in Israeli detention after they were released. Israel denies torture.
Months of efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza have yielded scant progress, and negotiations are now on hold
A ceasefire in the parallel conflict between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, took effect before dawn on Wednesday, bringing a halt to hostilities that had escalated sharply in recent months and had overshadowed the Gaza conflict.
Announcing the Lebanon accord on Tuesday, U.S. President Joe Biden said he would now renew his push for a ceasefire agreement in Gaza and he urged Israel and Hamas to seize the moment.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed nearly 44,300 people and displaced nearly all the enclave’s population at least once, Gaza officials say. Vast swathes of the territory are in ruins.
The Hamas-led militants who attacked southern Israeli communities 13 months ago, triggering the war, killed some 1,200 people and captured more than 250 hostages, Israel has said.
(Reuters)