Israeli offensive: 56 including 14 children killed in Gaza City
Hamas City commander also killed
Gaza City: Gaza’s ministry of health said the overall death toll since the latest offensive began stood at 56, including 14 children as more than 300 others have been wounded.
Six Israelis have also been killed, the Israeli army said claiming that about 1,500 rockets have been fired from Gaza towards various locations in Israel and they have added reinforcements near the enclave’s eastern lands.
Meanwhile, heavy bombardment on the Gaza Strip has continued into Wednesday as Israeli forces launched intensive raids on various locations across the besieged coastal territory.
Hamas, the group that rules the Gaza Strip, confirmed that its Gaza City commander, Bassem Issa, was killed in an Israeli airstrike along with other senior members of the group.
Local sources said Israeli fighter jets bombed sites belonging to Palestinian armed groups, in addition to security and police buildings. In Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood, a pregnant woman, Reema Telbani and her child were killed by an Israeli attack on their home.
Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel and Palestine at Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera that the level of unrest and violence in mixed Israeli-Palestinian cities was “unprecedented”.
“This is a convergence of many different factors. Unfortunately, in some ways the chickens have come home to roost. Israeli policies in mixed Israeli-Palestinian towns has never really been one of co-existence.
“There has been the same discrimination that you see in east Jerusalem happens inside Israel as well – in terms of housing policy discrimination, in rights, in all aspects of life, crime and negligence of the Israeli government – which Palestinian, Arab-Israeli parties have been calling out for years, asking for higher budgets, asking the police to rein in this violence. None of that has been happening, the government has neglected that,” explained ZonsZein.
“What we are seeing is the result (of this) together with the convergence of what’s been happening in east Jerusalem and in Gaza.”
“Coexistence has always been an illusion – Israel has a policy of discrimination on all fronts,” she added.
Meanwhile, Director of Al Shifa Hospital, Mohammed Abu Silmiya, said that Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have put pressure on a medical system which was already stretched to the breaking point.
“The situation is more than dire, simply because the Gaza strip has been under a tight siege for the past 14 years, he said, explaining that both the siege and coronavirus pandemic have exhausted Gaza’s health sector.
“Israel’s recent unjust and belligerent aggression has added insult to injury.”
“Our operating rooms have been suffering from a lack of supplies over the past 15 years – medicines are in short supply in the entire Gaza strip. This hospital has been running on the same devices and appliances for the past 20 years,” said Abu Slimiya.
UN Middle East peace envoy Tor Wennesland tweeted: “Stop the fire immediately. We’re escalating towards a full scale war. Leaders on all sides have to take the responsibility of de-escalation.
“The cost of war in Gaza is devastating & is being paid by ordinary people. UN is working w/ all sides to restore calm. Stop the violence now,” he wrote.
Into the early hours of Wednesday morning, Gazans reported their homes shaking and the sky lighting up with Israeli attacks, outgoing rockets and Israeli air defence missiles intercepting them.
Israelis ran for shelters or flattened themselves on pavements in communities more than 70 km (45 miles) up the coast and into southern Israel amid sounds of explosions as interceptor missiles streaked into the sky.
In the mixed Arab-Jewish town of Lod, near Tel Aviv, two people were killed after a rocket hit a vehicle in the area. Israeli media reported one was a 7-year-old girl.
Hamas’s armed wing said it fired 210 rockets towards Beersheba and Tel Aviv in response to the bombing of the tower buildings in Gaza City.
For Israel, the militants’ targeting of Tel Aviv, its commercial capital, posed a new challenge in the confrontation with the militant Hamas group, regarded as a terrorist organisation by Israel and the United States.
The violence followed weeks of tension in Jerusalem during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, with an attack by Israeli police on Palestinian worshippers in and around Al-Aqsa Mosque, on the compound revered by Jews as Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.
These escalated in recent days ahead of a – now postponed – court hearing in a case that could end with Palestinian families evicted from East Jerusalem homes claimed by Jewish settlers.
Violence has also flared in the occupied West Bank, where a 26-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli gunfire during stone-throwing clashes in a refugee camp near the city of Hebron.
There appeared no imminent end to the violence. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that militants would pay a “very heavy” price for the rockets, which reached the outskirts of Jerusalem on Monday during a holiday in Israel commemorating its capture of East Jerusalem in a 1967 war.
The outbreak of hostilities led Netanyahu’s political opponents to suspend negotiations on forming a coalition of right-wing, leftist and centre-left parties to unseat him after an inconclusive March 23 election.
Meanwhile, Sergei Vershinin, a Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, called on Israel to “immediately” stop all settlement activities in the Palestinian Territories, RIA news agency reported.
Vershinin also said that Moscow called for the “status quo of Jerusalem’s sacred sites” to be respected, RIA reported.
China’s special envoy on the Middle East, Zhai Jun, expressed “deep concern” over escalating violence in Palestinians and Israel and urged all parties to exercise restraint to avoid further casualties.
In a meeting with Arab envoys and the chief representative of the Arab League in China, Zhai said Beijing would continue to push the UN Security Council to take action on the situation in East Jerusalem as soon as possible, according to a foreign ministry statement.
Later in the day, the Israeli army says that a soldier was killed in an anti-tank missile attack near the Gaza Strip, the first military death in three days of fighting with Hamas.
The army identified the soldier killed on Wednesday morning as Staff Sgt. Omer Tabib, 21. An officer and another soldier were wounded in the attack. (with inputs from Al-Jazeera/AP)
