Israel launches new Gaza strikes after weekend attack kills scores in safe zone
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A Palestinian woman surveying damage to a house following Israeli bombardment at the Al-Maghazi Palestinian refugee camp.
PHOTO: AFP
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CAIRO - Israel struck the southern and central Gaza Strip on July 15 to put more pressure on Hamas following a weekend strike targeting the militant group’s leadership, which killed scores of Palestinians camped in a designated “safe zone”.
Two days after the Israeli strike turned a crowded swathe of Mawasi near the Mediterranean coast into a charred wasteland littered with burning cars and mangled bodies, displaced survivors said they had no idea where they should go next.
“Those moments as the ground shook underneath my feet and the dust and sand rose to the sky and I saw dismembered bodies – it was like nothing I have seen in my life,” said Ms Aya Mohammad, 30, a market seller in Mawasi, reached by mobile text message.
“Where to go is what everybody asks, and no one has the answer.”
Mawasi, on the western outskirts of Khan Younis, has been sheltering hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled to the area after Israel declared it a safe zone.
Israel said its strike there on July 13 targeted Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif
Palestinian officials say at least 90 people were killed on July 13 and many hundreds wounded. Reuters journalists at the scene filmed carnage, with residents carrying the wounded and dead amid flames and smoke.
Further south in Rafah, the main focus of Israel’s advance since May, residents reported renewed fighting on July 15. Israeli forces in western and central parts of the city blew up several homes, they said.
Medical officials said they recovered 10 bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in eastern areas of the city, some of which had already begun to decompose.
The military also stepped up aerial and tank shelling in central Gaza in the Al-Bureij and Al-Maghazi historic refugee camps. Health officials said five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strike on a house in the Maghazi camp.
The Israeli military said its forces struck dozens of Palestinian military targets across Gaza, killing many gunmen. It said forces killed gunmen in Rafah and central Gaza, sometimes in close combat.
A statement from the Al-Quds brigade, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad militant group, said its fighters were engaged in fierce battles in the Yabna camp in Rafah.
Talks
The carnage in Mawasi on July 13, one of the deadliest Israeli strikes of the war, has overshadowed negotiations that both sides had previously described as the closest yet to a lasting ceasefire. A senior Hamas official said on July 14 the group had not walked out of the talks despite the Mawasi strike.
Israel says another senior commander was killed in the strike but it has not yet confirmed the fate of Deif
The Gaza Health Ministry said at least 38,000 people have been killed in Israel’s military offensive since Oct 7. It does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, but officials say most of the dead throughout the war have been civilians.
Israel says it has lost 326 soldiers in Gaza and indicated at least a third of the Palestinian fatalities are fighters.
The war began after a Hamas-led attack inside Israel on Oct 7 by militants who killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took more than 250 hostages to Gaza, according to the Israeli authorities.
REUTERS
