As Israel’s aerial assault pummeled the Gaza Strip, it declared a more focused strategy to hunt down Hamas members and their commanders, compelling some displaced families to escape for their lives on donkey carts filled with children and belongings.
Gaza has been destroyed by Israel’s air and ground assault. As of Thursday, the Gaza health ministry said that 22,438 Palestinian deaths have been officially recorded, representing about 1% of the country’s 2.3 million residents.
More than 20 Palestinians were killed by Israeli bombardment of Gaza on Thursday, including 16 in Khan Younis city, a southern coastal town teeming with refugees from other parts of the territory, according to Gaza health officials.
They reported that nine children were among the fatalities. Health officials told Reuters that five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a car in the Al-Nusseirat refugee camp. Residents of Gaza reported that Israeli tanks and planes had also bombarded two other camps for refugees, forcing many of them to flee south.
Following the strikes, people began to flow out of the Al-Bureij, Al-Maghazi, and Al-Nusseirat refugee camps on Thursday. Some families were traveling in donkey carts that were filled with mattresses, bags, and kids. The agony of the displaced Palestinians has increased as a result of the rain turning the soil into muck.
⚡️WATCH: Al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas) published a video showing scenes of their forces clashing with militants vehicles & soldiers on the Gaza City axes. pic.twitter.com/aXjR8ryxrw
— Arya – آریا 🇮🇷 (@AryJeay) January 4, 2024
Residents of the central Gaza Strip reported that as night fell on Thursday, Israeli tanks and planes increased their shelling on the camps of Al-Maghazi and Al-Nusseirat to the east.
A new phase of Israel’s conflict in Gaza was described on Thursday by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. This phase involves a more focused strategy in the north and increased pursuit of Hamas officials in the south as Israel works to liberate its remaining prisoners from Hamas. The shift in tactics follows months of savage Israeli attacks on Gaza’s civilian population, which were unable to seriously harm the Hamas resistance movement.
Israel has been reducing its soldiers in Gaza to enable thousands of reservists to return to their jobs, in response to international pressure to switch to less aggressive military operations and economic hardships.
In a statement, Gallant stated that special forces operations, air and ground strikes, tunnel demolition, raids, and more will all be part of the operations in the north.
Gallant asserted that Hamas would lose control of Gaza after the battle and that Palestinian authorities would rule the area inasmuch as Israel was not under danger.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was scheduled to go on a week-long diplomatic trip to the Middle East on Thursday, the State Department announced, with the goal of assisting in preventing the situation from getting worse.
According to sources from the health ministry, Israeli shells fell close to tents set up by displaced residents in the vicinity of the alleged strike that occurred on Thursday in Al-Mawasi on the western side of Khan Younis.
Images from a hospital morgue in Khan Younis revealed multiple victims covered in blankets, as reported by Palestinian media.
“In Gaza, nowhere is safe. There are strikes everywhere you go. In Al-Mawasi, in the countryside, close to the camps. The brother of one of the deceased, Bahaa Abu Hatab, stated that there is no secure place.
The Israeli military stated in its daily briefing that two more Hamas fighters were killed by Israeli soldiers and three more by Israeli airplanes that had attempted to set off bombs adjacent to ground troops.
Afterwards, the military declared that fighters had destroyed an underground military base with a cache of weaponry that included RPG missiles, grenades, and mortars near the coast of the Gaza Strip.
The world community is worried that Israel’s war against Hamas is extending beyond Gaza and engulfing the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Hezbollah forces on the Israel-Lebanon border, and Red Sea trade lanes. The war is almost three months old.
After Hamas deputy commander Saleh al-Arouri was murdered by a drone attack in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital on Tuesday, the level of alarm increased. On Thursday, he was laid to rest in the city’s Shatila Palestinian camp, where crowds of mourners opened fire.
Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, declared on Wednesday that his organization “cannot be silent” in the wake of the murders, although he made no specific threats to take action against Israel in favor of Hamas.
Since the start of the Gaza war, Hezbollah and Israel have been engaged in almost daily artillery exchanges over Lebanon’s southern border. The attacks have caused serious deaths among IDF forces and badly damaged Israeli surveillance facilities along the border.
Israel did not deny or confirm that Arouri was killed.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, four people were hurt and a 17-year-old teenager died in Beit Rima, West Bank, as a result of Israeli forces on Friday.
Although Israel claims to have murdered 8,000 fighters in Gaza, there is photographic and video evidence of less than 100 fighters who were martyred.
Two blasts on Wednesday at a memorial service for the late Iranian General Qasem Soleimani at the cemetery in southeast Iran where he is buried killed close to 100 people, adding to the unrest in the area. The terrorist organization Islamic State took credit for it.
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