Israel launches new Gaza strikes after weekend attack kills scores in safe zone

[July 15, 2024]  By Nidal al-Mughrabi

CAIRO (Reuters) - Israel struck the southern and central Gaza Strip on Monday to put more pressure on Hamas, following a weekend strike targeting the militant group's leadership which killed scores of Palestinians camped in a designated "safe zone".

Two days after the Israeli strike turned a crowded swathe of Mawasi near the Mediterranean coast into a charred wasteland littered with burning cars and mangled bodies, displaced survivors said they had no idea where they should go next.

"Those moments as the ground shook underneath my feet and the dust and sand rose to the sky and I saw dismembered bodies - was like nothing I have seen in my life," said Aya Mohammad, 30, a market seller in Mawasi, reached by mobile text message.

"Where to go is what everybody asks, and no one has the answer."

Mawasi on the western outskirts of Khan Younis has been sheltering hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled to the area after Israel declared it a safe zone. Israel said its strike there on Saturday targeted Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, an architect of the Oct. 7 assault on Israeli towns and villages that triggered the Gaza war.

Palestinian officials say at least 90 people were killed on Saturday and many hundreds wounded. Reuters journalists at the scene filmed carnage, with residents carrying the wounded and dead amid flames and smoke.

Further south in Rafah, main focus of Israel's advance since May, residents reported renewed fighting on Monday. Israeli forces in western and central parts of the city blew up several homes, they said. Medical officials said they recovered 10 bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in eastern areas of the city, some of which had already begun to decompose.

The military also stepped up aerial and tank shelling in central Gaza in the Al-Bureij and Al-Maghazi historic refugee camps. Health officials said five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strike on a house in Maghazi camp.

Palestinians gather at the site of an Israeli air strike on a UN school sheltering displaced people, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Nusairat in central Gaza Strip, July 14, 2024. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo

The Israeli military said the air forces struck dozens of Palestinian military targets across Gaza, killing many gunmen. It said forces killed gunmen in Rafah and central Gaza, sometimes in close combat.

A statement from the Al-Quds brigade, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad militant group, said its fighters were engaged in fierce battles in the Yabna camp in Rafah.

TALKS

Saturday's carnage in Mawasi, one of the deadliest Israeli strikes of the war, has overshadowed negotiations that both sides had previously described as the closest yet to a lasting ceasefire. A senior Hamas official said on Sunday the group had not walked out of the talks despite the Mawasi strike.

Israel says another senior commander was killed in the strike but it has not yet confirmed the fate of Deif. Hamas officials have denied Deif was killed.

The Gaza health ministry said at least 38,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's military offensive since Oct. 7. It does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants but officials say most of the dead throughout the war have been civilians.

Israel says it has lost 326 soldiers in Gaza and says at least a third of the Palestinian fatalities are fighters.

The war began after a Hamas-led attack inside Israel on Oct. 7, by militants who killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took more than 250 hostage to Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.

(Reporting and writing by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Editing by Peter Graff; Additional reporting by Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem)

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