Israel pounded the length of the Gaza Strip on Thursday, killing families in their homes even as Washington sent an envoy to encourage its ally to guard better against civilian casualties in its war against Hamas militants.
The more than two-month-old war is now raging across the entire Palestinian enclave, causing a humanitarian catastrophe, with little end in sight.
“It will require a long period of time – it will last more than several months – but we will win and we will destroy them,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told visiting White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
In Rafah, jammed with people in makeshift tents on Gaza’s southern edge, people wept at a morgue near bodies wrapped in bloodied shrouds. Some of the dead were small children.
Residents picked forlornly through the rubble of the adjacent homes of the Abu Dhbaa and Ashour families where Gaza health authorities said 26 people had been killed.
Neighbor Fadel Shabaan had rushed to the area after the bombing. “It was difficult because of the dust and people’s screams,” he said. “This is a safe camp, there is nothing here, the children play soccer in the street.”
With Europe on alert for extremist attacks in response to the war, German prosecutors said four Hamas members were detained in Berlin and the Netherlands on suspicion of planning attacks on Jewish institutions.
Israel also said that seven people working for Hamas had been arrested in Denmark for planning an attack on civilians.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has brushed off calls for a ceasefire, including a resolution at the UN Security Council blocked by a US veto last week and another that passed overwhelmingly in the General Assembly this week.
Washington has provided diplomatic cover for its longstanding ally but expressed increasing alarm, with President Joe Biden calling Israeli bombing “indiscriminate”.
Sullivan, who met Netanyahu, planned to discuss with the Israelis the need to be more accurate in strikes, spokesperson John Kirby said.
‘Dumb bombs’
Up to 45% of the 29,000 air-to-ground munitions that Israel has dropped on Gaza since Oct. 7 have been unguided “dumb bombs” according to a US intelligence assessment reported by CNN.
Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, a member of Israel’s security cabinet and Netanyahu’s Likud party, rejected Biden’s characterization of Israel’s strikes as indiscriminate.
“There is no such thing as ‘dumb bombs’. Some bombs are more accurate, some bombs are less accurate. What we have is mostly pilots who are precise,” he told Army Radio, saying that only militants were targeted.
Israel launched its campaign in retaliation for a rampage by Hamas, the Iran-backed group that rules Gaza, whose fighters killed 1,200 Israelis and seized 240 hostages in a cross-border raid on Oct. 7.
Since then, Israeli forces have besieged the coastal strip and laid much of it to waste, with nearly 19,000 people confirmed dead, according to Palestinian health officials, and thousands more feared buried under the rubble.
Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been forced from their homes, many several times.
The UN Palestinian Refugee Agency said hungry people were stopping trucks and eating food aid immediately. “We meet more and more people who haven’t eaten for one, two or three days,” Philippe Lazzarini told reporters in Geneva.
People in Gaza described begging for bread, paying 50 times more than usual for a single can of beans and slaughtering a donkey to feed a large family.
Israel has extended its ground campaign from the north to the south this month. It says it is offering warnings where it can before striking an area.
In the main southern city Khan Younis, where advancing Israeli forces reached the center this week, a whole city block had been bombed overnight to dust. Though most people had fled after Israeli warnings, neighbors digging with a hand shovel believed four people were inside. One body had been recovered.
“May God take revenge on them,” said Nesmah al-Byouk, returning to the ruins of the home she had fled three days ago. “We came and saw everything destroyed, the house, the factory, our neighbors and house are all gone. Where can we go now?”
Revenge
In the north, including the ruins of Gaza City, fighting has escalated even after Israel announced its troops had largely completed their military objectives last month. Ten Israeli soldiers died on Tuesday, most in an ambush in a market area.
Um Mohammad, 53, a mother of seven still living in Gaza City, said intensified bombing overnight indicated the Israelis were seeking vengeance. “The resistance hurt them badly there,” she said.
The Israeli military said its troops had dismantled a “central operating site” of Hamas forces in a school in the Shejaia area and destroyed two tunnel shafts, a rocket launch pit and a weapons storage facility in Khan Younis.
Elsewhere in the north in Jabalia, Gaza’s health ministry said Israeli forces had stormed a hospital, detaining and abusing medical staff and preventing them from treating wounded patients, at least two of whom had died.
Twelve children were in the intensive care unit where the electricity had been cut and there was no milk, Gaza health spokesperson Ashraf al-Qidra said.
Israel’s military said fighters had been operating inside the hospital, 70 of whom had now surrendered “with weapons in hand” and had been sent away for interrogation.
It released pictures of a small group of men stripped to their waists, in track suit bottoms and sandals. In one picture, four prisoners are shown holding rifles over their heads. Another image showed a long column of clothed people walking with green slips of paper in their hands, apparently unarmed. Reuters could not reach the area.
There has also been an intensification of clashes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The Palestinian health ministry and international charities said at least 12 Palestinians, including a youth shot at a hospital, had been killed in a raid in the city of Jenin since Tuesday.
