A fresh Israeli air raid on Gaza early yesterday killed a 12-year-old, bringing the death toll from strikes since Friday to 17 and dashing Hamas hopes of restoring a tacit truce.
The killing of the leader of the ultra-hardline Popular Resistance Comittees (PRC) and a slew of other militants in Israeli raids on Friday unleashed a spiral of tit-for-tat violence on the Israel-Gaza border that has made for the highest death toll in more than three years.
The EU and the US urged both sides to restore calm, but Palestinian militants vowed to avenge their dead and Israel threatened to hit back if its citizens came under renewed rocket attacks from the coastal enclave.
Militants have fired about 100 rockets into the Jewish state since Friday.
“An Israeli air raid east of the Jabaliya refugee camp killed a 12-year-old and wounded another Palestinian,” a Palestinian medic said after the latest strike.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment.
Medics said three Palestinians were killed in air strikes on Saturday — one near the southern town of Rafah on the border with Egypt and two in Khan Yunis. One more was killed early yesterday in a fresh strike on the east of the Gaza Strip.
Yesterday’s deaths brought to 17 the total number of Palestinians killed since Friday, medics said, adding that at least 28 Palestinians had been wounded, five seriously.
The Israeli army said more than 100 rockets and mortar rounds had been fired into Israel from Gaza in a 24 hour period. Four people, three of them Thai laborers, had been wounded inside Israel, media and Israeli medics said.
The army said it had attacked several targets inside Gaza including “a terrorist squad” planning to fire rockets.
The air raids had been “in direct response to the rocket fire at Israeli communities in southern Israel,” it said.
One strike killed the leader of the PRC Zohair al-Qaisi and fellow member Mahmud Hanani, the ultra-hardline militant group said. The PRC threatened reprisals for al-Qaisi’s death.
The al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of Islamic Jihad, said the air strikes had killed 10 of its members.
It was the deadliest outbreak of violence on the Gaza-Israel border since a devastating Israeli assault from December 2008 to January 2009 aimed at halting Palestinian rocket attacks.
Thousands of mourners, many chanting calls for revenge and firing automatic weapons into the air, buried 12 Palestinians on Saturday. Palestinian security officials said that at one funeral, east of Gaza City and close to the Israeli border fence, Israeli troops opened fire on mourners, wounding four people.
The army had no immediate comment.
Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak said “the Israeli army will hit anyone planning to attack Israeli citizens.” He expected the violence to continue another day or two, he added.
Hamas, which rules Gaza, has maintained a tacit truce with -Israel, but other Palestinian groups regularly fire rockets and mortars across the border, often sparking retaliatory air strikes.
The relatively small PRC is one of the most active.
“We are not committed to the truce; we will respond very strongly to this [Israeli] crime,” said Abu Ataya, a spokesman for the PRC’s military wing, the al-Nasser Salaheddin Brigades.
Hamas also branded the killings a crime, but later said it was making contacts through Egypt to try to restore the tacit truce.
“We really want to put an end to the [Israeli] aggression in the Gaza Strip and the contacts that we have made with Egypt are to that end,” Hamas spokesman Taher al-Nunu said.
Hamas was prepared to help broker a ceasefire, “not a surrender,” but it would have to be applied on both sides simultaneously, he added.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the