Israeli forces yesterday carried out deadly strikes on southern Gaza and battled militants after the army again ordered Palestinians to leave areas near the besieged territory’s border with Israel and Egypt.
Witnesses reported intense bombing and shelling around Khan Yunis, southern Gaza’s main city from which Israeli forces withdrew in early April after a devastating months-long battle.
A hospital source in the city said shelling killed eight people and wounded more than 30 others.
Photo: AFP
The bombardment came after a rocket barrage on Monday targeting southern Israel claimed by the militant group Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas.
The rockets were aimed at Israeli communities near the Gaza border and were fired in retaliation for Israeli “crimes ... against our Palestinian people,” said the al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad.
The Israeli military said about “20 projectiles were identified crossing from the area of Khan Yunis,” most of which were intercepted.
This was followed by an order to evacuate most areas east of the cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah, including the towns of al-Qarara and Bani Suhaila.
The Israeli military reported no casualties and said artillery was “striking the sources of the fire.”
Bani Suhaila resident Ahmad Najjar said the Israeli order has spurred “fear and extreme anxiety,” and “there is a large displacement of residents.”
Six consecutive days of intense battles followed a similar evacuation order issued last week for the Gaza City district of Shujaiya.
An Agence France-Presse correspondent reported artillery shelling in the northern area yesterday, and witnesses said gun battles raged on.
The military said its forces were operating in Shujaiya, central Gaza and Rafah, where aircraft carried out strikes and troops “ambushed an armed terrorist squad” in a car and killed them.
Over the past day, the Israeli air force “struck approximately 30 terror targets” across Gaza, the Israeli military said in a statement.
In Shujaiya, Palestinian militants “were eliminated and dozens of terrorist infrastructure sites above and below ground were dismantled, including tunnel shafts,” it added.
In central Gaza, witnesses said strikes hit the Nuseirat refugee camp where the Palestinian Red Crescent reported at least one fatality, a child.
Other parts of the Gaza Strip were reeling from continued fighting nearly nine months into the war, sparked by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Months of on-and-off talks toward a truce and hostage release deal have made little progress, even after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently declared that the “intense phase” of the war was winding down.
“We’ve heard the Israelis talk about a significant downshift in their operations in Gaza,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday. “It remains to be seen.”
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
RSS