Israeli air strikes kill more than 80 in Gaza amid calls for civilians to flee
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GAZA – An official of the Hamas-run Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip said more than 80 people were killed on Nov 18 in double Israeli strikes on the Jabalia refugee camp.
“At least 50 people” were killed in an Israeli strike at dawn on the UN-run Al-Fakhura school in the camp, which had been converted into a shelter for displaced Palestinians, the official said.
Social media videos showed bodies covered in blood and dust on the floor of a building, where mattresses had been wedged under school tables.
A separate strike on another building in the camp on Nov 18 killed 32 people from the same family, 19 of them children, the Health Ministry official said.
The ministry released a list of 32 members of the Abu Habal family it said had died.
Jabalia is the biggest refugee camp in north Gaza, where some 1.6 million have been displaced by more than six weeks of fighting between Israel and Hamas.
Israel again warned civilians to relocate as it turns to attacking Hamas in the enclave’s south after subduing the north.
The move could compel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled south from the Israeli assault on Gaza City to move again, along with residents of Khan Younis, a city of more than 400,000, worsening a dire humanitarian crisis.
“We’re asking people to relocate. I know it’s not easy for many of them, but we don’t want to see civilians caught up in the crossfire,” Mr Mark Regev, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told MSNBC on Nov 17.
Israel vowed to annihilate the Hamas militant group that controls the Gaza Strip after its Oct 7 rampage into Israel,
Since then, Israel has bombed much of Gaza City – the enclave’s urban core – to rubble, ordered the depopulation of the northern half of the narrow strip
Many of those who have fled fear their homelessness could become permanent.
Gaza health authorities raised their death toll on Nov 17 to more than 12,000,
Overnight on Nov 18, 26 Palestinians were killed and 23 injured by an air strike on two apartments in a multi-storey block in a busy residential district of Khan Younis, according to health officials.
Mr Eyad Al-Zaeem said he lost his aunt, her children and her grandchildren in the air strike in Khan Younis, and that all had evacuated from north Gaza on Israeli army orders, only to die where the army told them they could be safe.
“All of them were martyred. They had nothing to do with the (Hamas) resistance,” said Mr Zaeem, standing outside the morgue at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, where 26 bodies were laid out before they were to be carried by loved ones to burials.
A few kilometres to the north, six Palestinians were killed when a house was bombed from the air in Deir Al-Balah, they said.
An Israeli military statement on Nov 18 made no mention of air strike locations. It said only that over the past 24 hours, its air force hit dozens of Gaza targets including militants, command centres, rocket launch sites and munitions factories.
Israel dropped leaflets over Khan Younis telling residents to evacuate to shelters, suggesting military operations there were imminent.
Mr Regev said Israeli troops would have to advance into the city to oust Hamas fighters from underground tunnels and bunkers, but that no such “enormous infrastructure” exists in less built-up areas to the west, nearer the Mediterranean coast.
“I’m pretty sure that they won’t have to move again” if they move west, he said, referring to people in the area.
“We’re asking them to move to an area where hopefully there will be tents and a field hospital.”
Mr Regev said that since western areas were closer to the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, humanitarian aid could be brought in “as quickly as possible”.
Fuel deliveries
With the war entering its seventh week, there was no sign of a let-up, despite international calls for a ceasefire
“We have prepared ourselves for a long and sustained defence from all directions. The more time the occupation’s forces stay in Gaza, the heavier their continuous losses,” Hamas armed wing spokesman Abu Ubaida said in a video statement.
Amid warnings that its Gaza siege raised the immediate risk of starvation, Israel on Nov 17 appeared to bow to international pressure in agreeing to allow fuel trucks in and promising “no limitation” on aid requested by the UN.
Israel said it would allow two truckloads of fuel a day at the request of main ally the United States to help the UN meet basic needs, and spoke of plans to increase aid more broadly.
“We will increase the capacity of the humanitarian convoys and trucks as long as there is a need,” Colonel Elad Goren from Cogat, the Ministry of Defence agency that coordinates administrative issues with the Palestinians, told a briefing.
The White House said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the fuel deliveries should “continue on a regular basis and in larger quantities”.
Palestinians queue for bread amid shortages of food supplies and fuel in Khan Younis in south Gaza on Nov 18.
PHOTO: REUTERS
At Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa in Gaza City, Israel said its forces had found a vehicle with many weapons and what it called a Hamas tunnel shaft.
Al-Shifa has been a primary target of Israel’s ground assault and a focus of international alarm over the deepening humanitarian crisis.
The army released a video it said showed a tunnel entrance in an outdoor area of the hospital. It appeared the area had been excavated. A bulldozer appeared in the background.
Israel has long maintained that the hospital sits above a vast underground bunker housing a Hamas command headquarters. Hospital staff say this is false and that Israel’s findings there have so far established no such thing.
The Israeli army said it briefly fought militants outside the hospital earlier this week before entering it to search it and question staff, and there had been no violence inside.
“We are seeing the Hamas presence in all of (Gaza) hospitals. This is a clear-cut presence,” Israeli Major-General Yraon Finkelman said in a video showing him conferring with army engineers excavating areas within Al-Shifa’s grounds.
“They are making cynical use of these hospitals, as we can see here in the heart of Shifa… They are hiding under the hospitals with their weaponry, with their command centres, with their capabilities.”
Hamas denies using hospitals for military purposes.
On Nov 18, the Israeli military denied accusations by Palestinian officials that it had ordered the evacuation of all staff and 1,000 to 1,500 patients there, with evacuees facing treks along dangerous, bombed-out roads littered with dead bodies. In a statement, the army said forces had acceded to a request from Al-Shifa’s director to “expand and assist” in more voluntary evacuations via a “secure route”. Medical personnel could stay to support patients too weak to be evacuated, it said.
Al-Shifa staff said a premature baby died in the hospital on Nov 17, the first baby to die there in the two days since Israeli forces entered. Three had died in the previous days while the hospital was surrounded.
Hamas also announced the death of a captive from Israel, an 85-year-old it said died of a panic attack during an air strike.
Violence also flared anew in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, with at least five Palestinians killed and two injured in an Israeli air strike on a building in the Balata refugee camp in the central city of Nablus, the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance service said early on Nov 18.
In a statement, the Israeli military said it struck “a number of terrorists… and prevented terror attacks against Israeli civilians”.
At least 186 West Bank Palestinians, including 51 children, have been killed by Israeli forces since the Oct 7 attack that triggered the Gaza war, according to UN figures. Another eight have been killed by Israeli settlers, while four Israelis have been killed by Palestinians, according to the figures. AFP, REUTERS
