GAZA STRIP: Israeli forces fought Hamas militants in besieged Gaza on Monday including around at least two major hospitals, raising fears for the patients, medics and displaced people trapped inside.
Troops and tanks have encircled Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, the territory’s biggest, for a week and more recently moved on the Al-Amal Hospital in the main southern city of Khan Yunis.
While Israel has labelled its operations “precise” and said it has taken care to avoid harm to civilians, aid agencies have voiced alarm about civilians caught up in the fighting.
As combat raged on, technical talks have continued in Qatar towards a truce and hostage release deal, and the UN Security Council was set to convene later in the day for a vote on a new ceasefire demand.
Almost six months into the war sparked by the October 7 attack, global concern has mounted over the threat of famine in Gaza, and on Israeli plans to invade the crowded far-southern city of Rafah.
UN chief Antonio Guterres, on a crisis visit to the Middle East, has pleaded for an end to the “non-stop nightmare” for the 2.4 million people trapped in Gaza’s worst-ever war.
As Israel’s top ally the United States has also voiced rising concern, the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, was headed to Washington for talks with Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin.
Gallant said his focus in the United States — which provides Israel with billions of dollars in military aid a year — would include “our ability to obtain platforms and munitions”.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads a coalition including ultra-nationalist parties, has vowed to go ahead with a Rafah invasion even without Washington’s support.
US Vice President Kamala Harris stressed on ABC TV that a Rafah invasion would be “a huge mistake” and, when asked whether she would rule out “consequences” for Israel, replied that “I am ruling out nothing”.
The Gaza war broke out after Hamas’s unprecedented attack of October 7 which resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel has vowed to destroy the militants, who also seized about 250 hostages, of whom Israel believes around 130 remain in Gaza, including 33 presumed dead.
The health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip on Sunday put the total Palestinian death toll at 32,333, most of them women and children.
Bombardment and fighting in Gaza killed another 72 people overnight, according to the ministry.
More than 50 airstrikes rained down on the Gaza Strip, said the Hamas government press office.
Israel’s armed forces gave a similar number and said its fighter jets and helicopters had struck about 50 “terror targets” and “eliminated approximately 10 terrorists”.
Food and water shortages have deepened the suffering, especially in northern Gaza where residents, mostly women and children, were waiting in line to fill up jerrycans and buckets in Jabalia.
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