“DEFENCELESS”
The war, now in its ninth month, has brought widespread devastation to Gaza, with one in 20 people dead or wounded, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. Most of Gaza’s 2.4 million inhabitants are displaced.
This grim reality was underscored by a strike whose aftermath, depicted in an AFP video, saw men salvaging what they could from a bombed-out Gaza City building and carrying away a shrouded body in a debris-strewn alley.
Maher al-Mughair, who lives nearby, recounted the attack on Friday, saying: “We heard what sounded like a drone firing a missile, followed by another coming from an F-16 fighter jet.”
“So we checked and found women and children in pieces. What did the children and women do wrong? They are defenceless people, merely civilians,” he told AFPTV.
In the same city on Saturday, five people were killed and seven wounded when an Israeli warplane bombed the Mhana family’s home in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, Gaza emergency services said.
Elsewhere, medics at Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital said six people were killed and others wounded in an Israeli rocket attack on the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, where witnesses said gun battles raged.
The Israeli army said it struck “dozens of terrorist cells and infrastructures” in Deir al-Balah and Bureij in the past day. Troops were also carrying out operations in Rafah.
The war was sparked by Hamas’s Oct 7 attack, which resulted in the deaths of 1,194 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Militants from Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups also took 251 hostages, 120 of whom remain in Gaza, including 41 the army says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 36,731 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
POLITICAL FALLOUT
Israel faced growing diplomatic isolation, with international court cases accusing it of war crimes and several European countries recognising a Palestinian state.
Israel’s UN envoy, Gilad Erdan, said Friday he was “disgusted” that the Israeli military would be on an upcoming United Nations list of countries and armed forces that fail to protect children during war.
A diplomatic source later told AFP that Hamas as well as Palestinian Islamic Jihad would also be included in the annual UN report, which highlights human rights violations against children in conflict zones and is expected by the end of June.
Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad are designated as terrorist organisations by several countries, including the United States and the European Union.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is due to address the US Congress next month, also faces pressure from within his right-wing government.
The office of war cabinet member Benny Gantz has announced a news conference for Saturday, the deadline he gave Netanyahu last month to approve a post-war plan for Gaza.
Israeli media have speculated that Gantz, a centrist former military chief who had been one of Netanyahu’s main rivals before joining the war cabinet, was likely to carry through on a threat to resign.
However, any such move is not expected to affect the stability of Netanyahu’s government, a coalition of his right-wing Likud with far-right and ultra-orthodox Jewish parties.
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