Israel leveled a northern Gaza district on Friday after giving families a half-hour warning to escape, and hit an Orthodox Christian church where others had been sheltering, as it made clear that a command to invade Gaza was expected soon. Israel’s defense minister said Friday that after the country destroys the Hamas militant group, the military does not plan to control “life in the Gaza Strip” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s comments to lawmakers were the first time an Israeli leader discussed its long-term plans for Gaza.
The Associated Press has the story:
Israel levels Gaza district, missile hits Orthodox church
Newslooks- GAZA/JERUSALEM, (AP)
Israel leveled a northern Gaza district on Friday after giving families a half-hour warning to escape, and hit an Orthodox Christian church where others had been sheltering, as it made clear that a command to invade Gaza was expected soon.
In Washington, U.S. President Joe Biden, back from a trip to Israel to demonstrate support, asked Americans in a televised speech to spend billions more dollars to help Israel fight Hamas, which he said sought to “annihilate” Israel’s democracy.
Israel has vowed to wipe out the Hamas Islamist group that rules Gaza, after its gunmen burst through the barrier fence surrounding the enclave on Oct. 7 and rampaged through Israeli towns and kibbutzes, killing 1,400 people, mainly civilians.
“You see Gaza now from a distance, you will soon see it from inside. The command will come,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told troops gathered at the Gaza border on Thursday.
Israel has pounded Gaza with air strikes and put the enclave’s 2.3 million people under a total siege, banning shipments even of food, fuel and medical supplies. Since Oct. 7, 3,785 Palestinians have been killed including more than 1,500 children, Palestinian officials say. The U.N. says more than a million have been made homeless.
Israel has already told all civilians to evacuate the northern half of the Gaza Strip, which includes Gaza City. Many people have yet to leave saying they fear losing everything and have nowhere safe to go with southern areas also under attack.
The Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the main Palestinian Christian denomination, said Israeli forces had struck the Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City, where hundreds of Christians and Muslims had sought sanctuary.
Video from the scene showed a wounded boy being carried from rubble at night. A civil defence worker said two people on upper floors had survived; those on lower floors had been killed and their bodies were still in the rubble.
“They felt they would be safe here. They came from under the bombardment and the destruction, and they said they would be safe here but destruction chased them,” a man cried out.
Gaza’s Hamas-run government media office said 18 Christian Palestinians had been killed. There was no immediate word from the church on the final death toll. It said targeting churches that were used as shelters for people fleeing bombing was “a war crime that cannot be ignored.”
The Israeli military said part of the church was damaged in a strike on a militant command centre and it was reviewing the incident.
In Zahra, a northern Gaza town, residents said their entire district of some 25 multi-storey apartment buildings was razed to the ground.
They received Israeli warning messages on their mobile phones at breakfast time, followed ten minutes later by a small drone strike that hammered the message home. Half an hour after the initial warning, F-16 warplanes brought the buildings down in huge explosions and clouds of dust.
“Everything I ever dreamt of and thought that I have achieved was gone. In that apartment was my dream, my memories with my children, and my wife, was the smell of safety and love,” Ali, a resident of the district, told Reuters by phone, declining to give his full name for fear of reprisals.
The United Nations humanitarian affairs office said more than 140,000 homes – nearly a third of all homes in Gaza – have been damaged, with nearly 13,000 completely destroyed.
The south of the enclave has also been regularly hit. Gaza authorities said there were several dead and wounded in fresh strikes on Khan Younis, the enclave’s main southern city.
OTHER FRONTS IN LEBANON, WEST BANK
While Israeli troops are massing around Gaza in anticipation of an order to invade, conflict is also spreading to two other fronts – the West Bank and the northern border with Lebanon.
The defense ministry ordered residents of the largest Israeli town near the Lebanese border, Kiryat Shmona, to evacuate to guest houses. Clashes at the border between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement have been the deadliest since a full-blown war in 2006.
In the West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said 13 people were killed including five children after Israeli troops raided and called in air strikes on the Nur Shams refugee camp near Tulkarm.
The territory, where Palestinians have limited self rule under Israeli military occupation, has seen the deadliest clashes since the second intifada uprising ended in 2005.
Diplomats fear the conflict could spread even further. The Pentagon on Thursday said a U.S. Navy warship operating in the northern Red Sea intercepted three cruise missiles and several drones launched by the Houthi movement in Yemen, potentially toward Israel.
The Houthi, like Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, are backed by Iran, which has lauded the Hamas attacks on Israel though it denies being behind them.
AID TO GAZA STILL HELD UP
Western leaders have so far mostly offered support to Israel’s campaign against Hamas, although there is mounting unease about the plight of civilians in Gaza, which has yet to receive long promised aid.
“We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace and have opportunity,” Biden said in his speech.
Israel has said it will allow no aid from its own territory to reach Gaza until more than 200 hostages captured by the gunmen are set free, a position Palestinians say amounts to unlawful collective punishment of the civilian population.
Biden secured a promise from Israel to allow some aid to enter Gaza from Egypt, provided it is monitored to ensure none reaches Hamas. So far, the trucks remain backed up on the Egyptian side of the crossing.
Israel doesn’t plan to control ‘life in Gaza’ after destroying Hamas, defense minister says
Newslook- KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP)
Israel’s defense minister said Friday that after the country destroys the Hamas militant group, the military does not plan to control “life in the Gaza Strip”
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s comments to lawmakers were the first time an Israeli leader discussed its long-term plans for Gaza.
Gallant said Israel expected there to be three phases to its war with Hamas. He said it first would attack the group in Gaza with airstrikes and ground maneuvers, then it would defeat pockets of resistance and finally it would cease its “responsibility for life in the Gaza Strip.”
Israel bombarded the Gaza Strip early Friday, hitting areas where Palestinians had been told to seek safety, and it began evacuating a sizable Israeli town near the border with Lebanon, the latest sign of a potential ground invasion of Gaza that could trigger regional turmoil.
Palestinians in Gaza reported heavy airstrikes in Khan Youni, a town in the territory’s south, and ambulances carrying men, women and children streamed into the local Nasser Hospital. The hospital, Gaza’s second largest, already was overflowing with patients and people seeking shelter.
The Israeli military said it had struck more than 100 targets across Gaza linked to the territory’s Hamas rulers, including a tunnel and arms depots.
On Thursday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered ground troops to prepare to see Gaza “from the inside,” hinting at a ground offensive aimed at crushing Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers nearly two weeks after their bloody incursion into Israel. Officials have given no timetable for such an operation.
Over a million people have been displaced in Gaza, with many heeding Israel’s orders to evacuate the northern part of the sealed-off enclave on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had called areas in south Gaza “safe zones” earlier this week, Israeli military spokesman Nir Dinar said Friday: “There are no safe zones.”
U.N. officials said that with the bombings across all of Gaza, some Palestinians who had fled the north appeared to be going back.
“The strikes, coupled with extremely difficult living conditions in the south, appear to have pushed some to return to the north, despite the continuing heavy bombing there,” Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the U.N. human rights office, said.
Gaza’s overwhelmed hospitals are rationing their dwindling medical supplies and fuel for generators, as authorities worked out logistics for a desperately needed aid delivery from Egypt. Doctors in darkened wards across Gaza performed surgeries by the light of mobile phones and used vinegar to treat infected wounds.
The deal to get aid into Gaza through the territory’s only entry point not controlled by Israel, remained fragile. Israel said the supplies could only go to civilians and that it would “thwart” any diversions by Hamas. More than 200 trucks and some 3,000 tons of aid were positioned at or near the crossing in Rafah, a city that straddles northern Egypt and southern Gaza.
Work began Friday to repair the road at the border that had been damaged in airstrikes, with trucks unloading gravel and bulldozers and other road repair equipment filling in large craters.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres visited the crossing Friday and appealed for the quick movement of aid into Gaza, calling it “the difference between life and death.”
Israel has evacuated its own communities near Gaza and Lebanon, putting residents up in hotels elsewhere in the country. The Defense Ministry announced evacuation plans Friday for Kiryat Shmona, a town of more than 20,000 residents near the Lebanese border. Three Israelis including a 5-year-old girl were wounded in a rocket attack there Thursday, according to Israeli health services.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group, which has a massive arsenal of long-range rockets, has traded fire with Israel along the border on a near-daily basis and hinted it might join the war if Israel seeks to annihilate Hamas. Israel’s archfoe Iran supports both armed groups.
The violence in Gaza has also sparked protests across the region, including in Arab countries allied with the U.S. Those demonstrations could flare anew Friday following weekly Muslim prayers.
In an address from the Oval Office on Thursday, U.S. President Joe Biden again pledged unwavering support for Israel’s security, while saying the world “can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians” in Gaza.
Speaking hours after returning to Washington from an urgent visit to Israel, Biden linked the current war in Gaza to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying Hamas and Russian President Vladimir Putin “both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy.”
Biden said he was sending an “urgent budget request” to Congress on Friday, to cover emergency military aid to both Israel and Ukraine.
Meanwhile, an unclassified U.S. intelligence assessment delivered to Congress estimated casualties in an explosion at a Gaza City hospital this week on the “low end” of 100 to 300 deaths. The death toll “still reflects a staggering loss of life,” said the report, seen by The Associated Press. It said intelligence officials were still assessing the evidence and their casualty estimate may evolve.
The report echoed earlier assessments by U.S. officials that the blast at the al-Ahli hospital was not caused by an Israeli airstrike, as the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza initially reported. Israel has presented video, audio and other evidence it says proves the blast was caused by a rocket misfired by Palestinian militants.
The AP has not independently verified any of the claims or evidence released by the parties.
An Israeli airstrike hit a Greek Orthodox church housing displaced Palestinians near the hospital late Thursday. The Israeli military said it had targeted a Hamas command and control center nearby, causing damage to a church wall. Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry said 16 Palestinian Christians were killed.
The Greek Orthodox Patriarchy of Jerusalem condemned the attack and said it would “not abandon its religious and humanitarian duty” to provide assistance.
The Israeli military has relentlessly attacked Gaza in retaliation for the devastating Oct. 7 Hamas attack.
Palestinian militants have meanwhile launched unrelenting rocket attacks into Israel — more than 6,900, according to Israel — and tensions have flared in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Thirteen Palestinians, including five minors, were killed Thursday during a battle with Israeli troops in which Israel called in an airstrike, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. An Israeli border police officer was killed in the fighting, Israel said.
The Gaza Health Ministry said 3,785 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, the majority women, children and older adults. Nearly 12,500 were injured, and another 1,300 people were believed buried under rubble, authorities said.
More than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed, mostly civilians slain during Hamas’ deadly incursion. Roughly 200 others were abducted. The Israeli military said Thursday it had notified the families of 203 captives.
In a fiery speech on Thursday to Israeli infantry soldiers on the Gaza border, Gallant, the defense minister, urged them to “be ready” to move in. Israel has called up some 360,000 reserves and massed tens of thousands of troops along the Gaza border.
“Whoever sees Gaza from afar now, will see it from the inside,” he said. “It might take a week, a month, two months until we destroy them,” he added, referring to Hamas.
With supplies running low because of a complete Israeli siege, some Gaza residents are down to one meal a day and drinking dirty water.
Egypt and Israel were still negotiating the entry of fuel for hospitals. Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Hamas has stolen fuel from U.N. facilities and Israel wants assurances that won’t happen again.
The Gaza Health Ministry has pleaded with gas stations to give fuel to hospitals, and a U.N. agency also donated some of its last fuel. Gaza’s sole power plant shut down last week, forcing Palestinians to rely on generators, and no fuel has gone in since the start of the war.
The agency’s donation to Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, the territory’s largest, would “keep us going for another few hours,” said Mohammed Abu Selmia, the hospital director.
