Hopes are dashed for the much-desired one. Despite hopes that appeared to be rising last Saturday that a ceasefire deal would be struck, violence has continued, with at least 35 people killed in the past 24 hours, according to civil protection in the Palestinian enclave, devastated after 14 months of war.
As well as two other Palestinian organizations, they hinted yesterday that reaching an agreement to declare a truce is “closer than ever”.
Bombardment barrage
But the battles and bombings do not stop until now in the coastal enclave, which within a few hours suffered a series of bombings by his army.
One of them targeted a school building hosting displaced people in Gaza City (north) on the night of Saturday to Sunday. At least eight people were killed, including four children, civil protection told AFP.
Residents were yesterday morning trying to retrieve items that could still be used amid the bloodstained debris at the Musa Ben Nusseir school.
“Human flesh everywhere”
The sun sets in the northern Gaza Strip, near the Israel-Gaza border
“We were woken up by a loud explosion and screaming,” said one of them, Abu Ali al-Jamal. “We found women and children dismembered and human flesh everywhere.”
The Israeli military announced that it had carried out a “targeted strike against Hamas terrorists who were operating” at the school “to prepare terrorist attacks against Israeli troops and the State of Israel”. He assured that he had taken “multiple measures” to “reduce the risk of civilians being hit”.
“We lose relatives every day”
Funeral of a child killed in an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah
According to civil protection, another shelling, against a family home in Deir al-Bala (central), killed 13 people.
Wrapped in blankets, two bodies lay on the ground, while residents searched the wreckage for survivors.
“We are losing relatives every day,” said Naim al-Ramlawi. “I pray to God that a ceasefire is quickly agreed and a solution is found so that we can live.”
The Israeli military said it had targeted a “terrorist” from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another armed movement in the Gaza Strip, “based on information” gathered by intelligence, adding that the death toll it gave did not match the information it had in his disposition.
Search and rescue workers also spoke of three dead, “unidentified”, in a shelling in Rafah (south), as well as four others in Gaza City, in a drone strike confirmed by an AFP source in the Israeli security services .
Last night the toll became even heavier, with seven more dead, according to civil protection, in a refugee camp in Khan Younis (south), where the Israeli army said it targeted a “Hamas terrorist”.
Pope Francis condemned, for the second time in two days, the “brutality” of the bombings in the Gaza Strip, despite the protests of Israeli diplomacy, which accused him of “two standards”.
“I think with pain in Gaza, so much brutality, the children being shot at, the bombing of schools and hospitals,” he said during his Sunday message.
Snapshot from Deir al-Bala
Kamal Antoine is in the sights
The director of the Kamal Antoine hospital, one of only two still partially functioning in the Gaza Strip, said yesterday that the generators powering the health facility were struck by the Israeli army.
“The (Israeli) army tried to hit the fuel tank,” which would have caused a “fire,” Hussam Abu Shafia complained. Asked about this by AFP, a spokesman for the Israeli army denied that its forces opened fire in the direction of the hospital.
Israel continues to tightly control all humanitarian aid shipments destined for the enclave, and the 2.4 million are desperately needed. Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip.
And it has been repeatedly accused of committing “genocide” in the Gaza Strip, especially before international justice, by various countries, at the initiative of South Africa. The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — for whom an international arrest warrant has been issued — angrily rejects the accusation.
“Of just 34 trucks carrying food and water allowed into the northern Gaza Strip over the past two and a half months, deliberate delays and systematic obstruction by the Israeli military have meant that only a dozen have managed to deliver aid to starving Palestinian civilians “, the international non-governmental organization emphasized yesterday Sunday Oxfam, sounding the alarm over the further deterioration of the situation in the Palestinian enclave.
Source: APE – MEB
