On the fourth day of the war, Israel attacks central Gaza City and mobilizes 300,000 reservists
By Zuleihat Owuiye, Mamos Nigeria
The bombing occurred early Tuesday morning after Israel’s prime minister promised retaliation against “generations of” Islamic extremists.
The four-day war has already claimed at least 1,600 lives, saw Israel experience gunfire on the streets of its own cities for the first time in decades, and reduced sections of the Gaza Strip to rubble. Hamas also escalated the conflict by vowing to kill captured Israelis in the event of attacks on civilian targets without warning.
The Israeli military says it has found the bodies of about 1,500 Hamas fighters inside Israeli territory, where it has taken effective control of the south and has “complete control” of the border. It was not immediately clear whether these numbers overlap with the death toll previously reported by the Palestinian Authority.
Israel has detained more than 150 soldiers and civilians kidnapped from inside Israel by Hamas and other militant groups in the Gaza Strip in an attack that caught its vaunted military and intelligence agencies by surprise. It was announced that there was.
As the Israeli army mobilized and mobilized its 300,000 reservists, the key question was whether to launch a ground attack on the small Mediterranean region. The last ground attack took place in 2014.
The move, along with Israel’s official declaration of war on Sunday, comes as Israel increasingly goes on the offensive against Hamas, threatening further destruction in the densely populated and impoverished Gaza Strip. It shows that
“We have just begun the attack on Hamas,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a nationally televised address. “What we do against our enemies in the coming days will resonate with them for generations.”
Israeli forces are located in Rimal, an upscale district of Gaza City, a densely populated area of the Gaza Strip. It said it had attacked hundreds of Hamas targets. In addition to Hamas ministries, it also houses the offices of universities, media outlets, and aid agencies.
After a strike that lasted for hours all night, some Rimal residents left their homes at dawn to find some buildings torn in half by the strike, others destroyed in concrete and rebar. I found it turned into a mountain. Cars were flattened and trees burned in the moonlit landscape of what was once a residential area.
The tragedy in Rimal hinted at a potential new Israeli tactic: warning civilians to leave a particular area and then attacking the area with airstrikes of unprecedented intensity.
Heavy shelling began over the weekend in areas of the Gaza Strip bordering Israel and moved overnight into central Gaza City. If this type of shelling continues, civilians in Gaza will have fewer options to protect themselves as more areas become uninhabitable.
More than 187,000 people out of the Gaza Strip’s population of 2.3 million have fled their homes, the United Nations said on Tuesday. This is the highest number since 2014, when Israeli air and ground attacks displaced around 400,000 people.
UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, hosts more than 137,000 of them in its schools in the territory. Families took in about 41,000 more people.
Mr. Hecht suggested at Tuesday’s press conference that Palestinians try to leave the country through the Rafah border with Egypt. Shortly afterward, the Israeli military announced that the Rafah border had been closed, but Hamas officials later said it was Palestinians who had previously registered to enter Egypt.
