At least 52 Palestinians have been killed and over 120 injured over the past 24 hours as a result of the Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip, the enclave’s Health Ministry said, APA reports.
“Over the past 24 hours, 50 people were killed and another 124 were injured as a result of Israeli shelling in different areas of the Strip,” the ministry said in a statement on its Telegram channel. It added that the total number of victims of the Israeli army’s actions in the enclave rose to 40,223, while another 92,981 people were wounded.
The Israeli army has ordered new evacuations from areas of central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah near Khan Younis, signaling an expansion of the army’s ground operations from south to central Gaza, our correspondent reports.
Israel has assassinated Khalil al-Muqdah, a commander in the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, in a drone strike on a car in Lebanon’s Sidon, only 40km (25 miles) south of Beirut.
The United States’s top diplomat Antony Blinken urged stakeholders to get the Gaza ceasefire deal “over the finish line now” as he ended his Middle East tour without an agreement between Israel and Hamas.
At least 40,223 people have been killed and 92,981 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 and more than 200 were taken captive.
Witnesses whose relatives died in one of the bombardments near a Red Cross field hospital told The Associated Press that Israeli forces fired a second volley that killed people who came out of their tents.
The locations of the attacks provided by the Civil Defense appear to be just outside an Israeli-designated safe zone on Gaza’s Mediterranean coast. The Israeli military said the episode was under review but that “there is no indication that a strike was carried out by the IDF” inside the safe zone.
Israel is pushing ahead with the military operation in Rafah, where over a million Palestinians had sought refuge from fighting elsewhere in Gaza. Most have now fled Rafah, but the United Nations says no place in Gaza is safe and humanitarian conditions are dire as families shelter in tents and cramped apartments.
Acute food shortages in northern Gaza are driving up the number of children suffering from malnutrition, the head of a major hospital said Friday, and his staff has treated some 250 malnourished kids so far. Palestinians face widespread hunger as the war has largely cut off the flow of food, medicine and basic goods to Gaza, which is now totally dependent on aid.
