On the night of Sunday, a home in Deir al-Balah, central to the Gaza Strip, was hit by an Israeli attack. A woman and her six children were killed, according to al-Aqsa Hospital. A reporter from news agency AP counted the bodies.
The children’s grandfather, Mohammed Awad Khatab, says that the daughter was a teacher, and that the youngest child was 18 months old. The siblings were ten-year-old quintuplets, the hospital says.
– The six children have become body parts. They were put in one and the same bag, says the grandfather to journalists.
– What did they do? Did they kill any of the Jews? Will this give Israel security? he asks.
The Israeli army rarely comments on individual attacks and has not commented on this either.
Israel blames Hamas
Another attack east of Deir al-Balah on Sunday claimed at least four lives, according to an AP journalist at the hospital. In Jabalia in northern Gaza, two men, a woman and her daughter were killed in an attack that hit two apartments, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
Another nine people were killed in two attacks in the central Gaza Strip, while one person was killed in Nuseirat, according to Al-Awda Hospital.
Late Saturday night, four people from the same family were killed in an attack against Khan Younis in the south. Two of those killed were women, according to the Nasser hospital.
Israel says it only attacks militant Palestinians and blames Hamas for killing civilians because the group’s soldiers, weapons and tunnels hide in residential areas. But the Israeli attacks have wiped out entire extended families and made thousands of children orphans throughout the war.
Over 40,000 killed
According to the Ministry of Health, at least 40,099 Palestinians have been killed after more than ten months of war in Gaza. Among them are at least 10,627 children, of whom 663 were under the age of one.
The figure has not been confirmed elsewhere, however The UN considers them reliable. Thousands of Palestinians are also missing and over 92,400 injured.
Most of the population of 2.3 million have been displaced, and there are fears of famine and outbreaks of polio and other diseases.
– We are tired
Palestinians are constantly driven to flee again, and in the last week the Israeli army has ordered the forced evacuation of tens of thousands of Palestinians in several areas.
– We are tired of being displaced. People are being squeezed into tight spaces in Deir al-Balah and Al-Mawasi, which have become pressure cookers, Tamer Al-Burai told the Reuters news agency.
He lives in Deir al-Balah with several relatives and says that Israeli tanks are only 1.5 kilometers away.
The army has announced a new offensive in areas near Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis on the grounds that Palestinian militants are firing rockets from there.
Armistice negotiations
The ongoing war was sparked by the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 in which at least 1,198 people were killed, most of them civilians. Militant Palestinians took 251 hostages and prisoners of war, of which 111 are still in the Gaza Strip.
A total of 39 of them are no longer alive, according to the Israeli army. Over 100 hostages were released during the only truce of the war so far – which lasted for a week at the end of November.
Before the weekend, mediators from the United States, Qatar and Egypt tried to bring Israel and Hamas closer to an agreement on a cease-fire in Gaza and the exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. They agreed to continue negotiations in Cairo next week.
While the US and Israel have expressed that there is some progress in the talks, Hamas claims that there are no real negotiations. The Palestinian group believes that Israel has come up with new demands that are not in line with the American peace plan they have previously agreed to, and that the parties are therefore no closer to an agreement.
On Sunday, US Foreign Minister Antony Blinken arrived in Israel, where on Monday he will have several meetings with the country’s leadership with the aim of establishing a ceasefire agreement.
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2024-08-21 06:51:29
