▲ Gazan children in Khan Younis, in the southwestern Gaza region, this week.Photo Xinhua
Ap, Europa Press, Afp and Sputnik
The newspaper La Jornada
Sunday, August 25, 2024, p. 19
Cairo, 2015. At least three dozen bodies, including several children, were brought to Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, south of Gaza, yesterday after a wave of Israeli attacks, while the Martyrs of Al Aqsa hospital said it received another three bodies after the attack in the early hours of yesterday.
Israel said in the strikes that a senior Hamas militant, Taha Abu Nada, one of the leaders of the rocket-launching division, had been killed.
Emergency crews recovered 10 more bodies in a residential block west of Khan Yunis, 16 in the Hamad City area, also in Khan Yunis, and two more in Rafah, farther south. The circumstances of their deaths were unclear, but those areas have been repeatedly shelled by the Israeli military over the past week. An AP reporter at the hospital counted the bodies and recorded the funeral service held in the center’s courtyard.
Some residents returned to Hamad City, stepping over rubble and between destroyed apartment buildings.
There is nothing, no apartments, no furniture, no houses, just destruction.Neveen Kheder testified.
We are slowly dying. If they gave us a bullet out of mercy it would be better than what is happening to us.he said.
Meanwhile, hunger and desperation are palpable in the camp on the beach of Deir al Balah, after a month of successive evacuation orders that forced thousands of Palestinians to take refuge in the area that the Israeli army calls humanitarian zonenarrow and unhealthy, according to media reports from the strip.
In the past two days alone, 100,000 people have been displaced from Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip as a result of intense attacks by the IDF. Some 20 shelters have been rendered unusable due to shelling and evacuation orders by Israeli forces, according to local sources cited by the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that between July 1 and August 21, 16 forced evacuation orders were issued, affecting some 213,000 Palestinians. The UN estimates that nine out of 10 inhabitants of the enclave had to flee, and warned that most of the population has to resettle at least once a month.
Meanwhile, a Hamas delegation arrived in Cairo to assess progress in the negotiations, and reported that it will focus on a ceasefire and prisoner exchangedeclared the media adviser to the head of the Hamas Political Bureau, Taher al Nunu, the day before yesterday.
At press time, Gaza was again under Israeli fire. Medical sources confirmed six dead in Deir al Balah and an undetermined number wounded. There was no information yet on the consequences of the attacks in Khan Yunis, but Wafa confirmed that that region was also bombed.