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Nearly 20,000 Gazans have been confirmed killed during the 11-week conflict, according to the Palestinian health ministry, with thousands more bodies believed trapped under rubble. Almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced.
Israel says 140 of its soldiers have been killed since it launched its ground incursion on October 20, in response to an October 7 rampage into Israel by Gaza’s ruling Hamas militants, who killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages back into the enclave.
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The official Palestinian news agency WAFA said at least 18 Palestinians were killed and dozens others wounded in an air strike on a house in Nusseirat, central Gaza, late on Friday.
Israel has long urged residents to leave northern areas of Gaza but its forces have also been bombarding targets in central and southern parts of the tiny coastal enclave.
“Where should we go to? There is no place safe,” Ziad, a medic and father of six, told Reuters by phone. “They ask people to head to (the central Gaza city of) Deir Al-Balah, where they bomb day and night.”
At least four people, including a girl, were killed in an Israeli air strike on a house in Al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza Strip, medics said on Saturday.
Separately, Palestinian mourners attended the burial of a family of four killed in an Israeli airstrike on Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
The conflict has spread beyond Gaza, including into the Red Sea where Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi forces have been attacking vessels with missiles and drones in retaliation for Israel’s assault on the enclave, whose Hamas rulers are backed by Iran.
An Israel-affiliated merchant vessel in the Arabian Sea off India’s west coast was struck by an unmanned aerial vehicle, causing a fire, British maritime security firm Ambrey said on Saturday.
An Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander said the Mediterranean Sea could be closed if the United States and its allies continued to commit “crimes” in Gaza, Iranian media reported on Saturday, without explaining how that would happen.
After days of wrangling to avert a threatened US veto, the U.N. Security Council on Friday passed a resolution urging steps to allow “safe, unhindered, and expanded humanitarian access” to Gaza and “conditions for a sustainable cessation” of fighting.
The resolution was toned down from earlier drafts that called for an immediate end to 11 weeks of war and diluting Israeli control over aid deliveries, clearing the way for the vote in which the United States, Israel’s main ally, abstained.
The United States and Israel, which has vowed to eradicate Hamas, oppose a ceasefire, contending it would allow the Islamist militant group to regroup and rearm.
US President Joe Biden’s administration, however, has grown increasingly critical of the mounting casualty toll and humanitarian crisis that has worsened as Israel presses on with its ground and air offensive.
Opinion polls in Israel show continued strong public support for the IDF military operation in Gaza but also increased doubts about the chances of the remaining hostages held by Hamas – believed to number more than 100 – returning home.
Reuters
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