GAZA: On Monday, Israel stepped up its offensive against Hamas in the besieged Gaza Strip, as concern around the world grew over the rising number of civilian deaths in the war.
Israel and Hamas’s return to open fighting after a truce ended has sent shockwaves through a region that is on the verge of a bigger war.
As of Friday, the ceasefire between Hamas and Israeli troops in Gaza had ended. Since then, rockets have been fired at Israel and Israel has attacked the Palestinian area from the air.
Sunday and Monday, Israeli airstrikes on northern Gaza sent thick clouds of smoke and dust into the air.
The Israeli army said on Sunday that a number of rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel, but that most of them were blocked.
The Palestinian government in Gaza and the official news agency Wafa both said late Sunday that an attack had hit the door to the Kamal Adwan hospital in the north of the territory.
The news service said that several people were killed in the attack. On Telegram, Hamas said that Israel had committed a “grave violation” of humanitarian law.
When AFP called the Israeli forces, they didn’t say anything right away about the strike.
The resistance group Hamas denies that it uses hospitals and other civilian buildings for military reasons, which is what Israel says.
“The IDF continues to expand its ground operation against main Hamas fronts in the Gaza Strip,” Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said on Sunday.
“Wherever there is a Hamas stronghold, the IDF operates,” he said, referring to the Israeli Defense Forces.
To punish Hamas for its attacks on Israel on October 7, Israel has promised to crush the rebel group.
About 240 more were taken as prisoners into Gaza during the strikes.
The health minister in Gaza says that since October 7, more than 15,500 people have been killed there. More than half of those killed were women and children.
With help from Egypt and the US, Qatar brokered a truce that freed 80 Israeli prisoners in return for the freedom of 240 Palestinians who were being held in Israeli jails.
More than twenty other prisoners were also set free in Gaza.
But fighting started up again between the two sides on Friday, even though people around the world wanted the ceasefire to last longer.
The next day, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israeli peace officials were being sent back to Israel “following the impasse in the negotiations” to start the peace talks again.
The Israeli military says that 137 prisoners are still being held in Gaza. Hamas has said that no more prisoners will be released until a lasting ceasefire is reached.
The Israeli military said on Sunday that since the war began, it had done about 10,000 airstrikes. There were two deaths in fighting in Israel on Sunday. They were the first deaths since the end of the truce.
A spokeswoman for Gaza’s health ministry, Ashraf al-Qudra, said in a statement, “In the last few hours, only 316 dead and 664 injured people have been rescued from the rubble and taken to hospital. Many others are still stuck under the rubble.”
More and more people are dying in Gaza, which is making people around the world worry about how Israel is handling the war to get rid of Hamas.
On Sunday, hospitals in the southern part of Gaza were packed full of hurt and dead people, some of whom were crying out in pain.
“I am running out of ways to describe the horrors hitting children here,” UNICEF director James Elder said in a video from Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis.
Here in south Gaza, this is the worst shelling of the war so far. “I am seeing a huge number of child deaths,” he said in the video, which was shared on X (formerly Twitter).
Huda, who is nine years old and was hit in the head, came to the Deir al-Balah hospital with a group of people from northern Gaza who were hurt by fighting sent by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
“She doesn’t answer me anymore,” her crying father, Abdelkarim Abu Warda, said.
The United States, which is Israel’s ally and gives it billions of dollars in military help every year, has made it clear that Gaza’s civilians need to be protected.
“Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed,” Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters at climate talks in Dubai.
Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy said that Hamas was to blame for the deaths and that the people who died “would still be alive” if the group hadn’t attacked on October 7.
The US Central Command says that on Sunday, a US warship helping commercial ships in the Red Sea shot down several drones over the sea. This was done because of growing fears of a larger regional conflict.
Houthi rebels said they went after two of the ships and have been firing drones and missiles at Israel for the past few weeks. Last month, they took over a cargo ship. Still, the most recent attacks make the danger to ships in the area much worse.
According to Iraqi security sources, at least five pro-Iranian rebels were killed in an air strike on Sunday. This happened just one day after Baghdad warned Washington against “attacks” on its land.
There was also fighting on the northern border of Israel with Lebanon.
The Israeli army said it had fired artillery in answer to fire from across the border, and its fighter jets hit several targets with ties to the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah.
One of the attacks Hezbollah said it had made on Israeli positions was with a missile that hit a military truck.
