GAZA CITY – Gaza health authorities said fresh Israeli air strikes killed four people on Thursday as Qatar, a mediator of the weeks-long ceasefire, warned that renewed attacks threatened to undermine the fragile truce between Israel and Hamas.
The new strikes came the morning after one of the deadliest days in the Gaza Strip since the truce came into effect on 10 October, and after Israel launched a string of attacks targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon despite the nearly year-long ceasefire there. The Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza said four people were killed in the strikes early Thursday, after the territory’s civil defence agency, which operates under Hamas authority, gave a lower toll of three dead. The hospital said three from one family, including a one-year-old girl, were killed in a strike on a house east of Khan Yunis and one more person was killed in an air strike on the town of Abasan al-Kabira, also east of Khan Yunis. A source at Gaza’s Hamas-run interior ministry, who did not wish to be identified, said artillery fire was continuing in the Khan Yunis area.
Qatar, a key mediator in the Hamas-Israel war, condemned what it called the “brutal” Israeli air strikes, saying they were “a dangerous escalation that threatens to undermine the ceasefire agreement”. Gazans voiced despair at the fresh wave of attacks, saying it felt on the ground like the two-year war was continuing.
“We are worried about the war returning. The sound of artillery shelling and explosions from the demolition operations east of Gaza was terrifying last night,” Lina Kuraz, 33 year old, from the Tuffah neighbourhood, east of Gaza City, told AFP. “My daughter kept asking me all night, ‘Will the war come back?’. Every time we try to regain hope, the shelling starts again. When will this nightmare end?” added Kuraz. The so-called yellow line demarcates the boundary inside the Gaza Strip that Israeli troops have withdrawn behind, as part of the US-brokered ceasefire.
“We are aware of a strike east of the yellow line that was done to dismantle terror infrastructures,” the Israeli military told AFP.
“We’re not aware of the reported casualties. It’s part of the regular IDF (Israeli military) operations east of the yellow line,” the militant added. Israel has carried out repeated strikes against what it says are Hamas targets during the ceasefire, resulting in the death of more than 312 Palestinians, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. Wednesday’s Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip left 27 dead, according to the civil defence agency. “The war hasn’t ended. Nothing has really changed,” said Mohammed Hamdouna, 36 years old, who was displaced from northern Gaza to a tent in Al-Mawasi, west of Khan Yunis.
“The intensity of the death toll has decreased, but martyrs and shelling happen every day. We are still living in tents. The cities are rubble, the crossings are still closed, and all the basic necessities of life are still lacking,” he told AFP.
– Nampa/AFP