Israeli strikes intensifying across Gaza
Officials: 310 bodies found in mass grave at Gaza’s Nasser hospital
Israeli strikes intensified across Gaza on Tuesday in some of the heaviest shelling in weeks, pounding the north from where the Israeli army had previously drawn down its troops, residents said.
Strikes by air and shelling from tanks on the ground were also reported in central and southern areas in what residents said were almost nonstop bombardments.
Overnight, tanks made a new incursion east of Beit Hanoun on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip, though they did not penetrate far into the city, residents and Hamas media said. Gunfire reached some schools, causing panic among displaced residents sheltering there.
In Israel, where government offices and businesses were shut to celebrate the Jewish Passover holiday, incoming rocket alerts sounded in southern border towns, although no casualties were reported.
The armed wing of Islamic Jihad, a group allied to Hamas, claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks on Sderot and Nir Am, indicating fighters were still able to launch them almost 200 days into the war, which has flattened large swathes of the enclave and displaced almost all of its 2.3 million people.
Thick black smoke could be seen rising in northern Gaza from across the southern Israeli border. Shelling was intense east of Beit Hanoun and Jabalia and continued on Tuesday in areas such as Zeitoun, one of Gaza City’s oldest suburbs, with residents reporting at least 10 strikes in a matter of seconds along the main road.
Just west of Beit Hanoun in Beit Lahiya an airstrike hit a mosque, killing a boy and injuring several others, while a medic was killed in shelling near the town stadium, medics said.
A separate strike in Beit Lahiya hit a
crowd gathering on the coastal road to collect aid dropped from the air. Reuters could not immediately confirm those targets, or whether there were casualties.
Elsewhere in the enclave, shelling hit the east of the main southern city Khan Younis a day after tanks raided the area, and in the central district four bodies were recovered from a house hit overnight in the Al-nusseirat refugee camp.
The Israeli army said rockets launched overnight into Israel had come from northern Gaza. It had struck rocket launchers and killed several militants, in what it called “targeted and precise” strikes.
“Over the past day, IAF fighter jets and additional aircraft struck approximately 25 terror targets throughout the Gaza Strip, including military infrastructure, observation posts, terrorists, launch posts,” it said in a statement.
The renewed shelling and bombing of northern Gaza comes almost four months after the Israeli army announced it was drawing down its troops there, saying Hamas no longer controlled those areas.
This month, Israel also drew down most of its forces in southern Gaza. But efforts to reach a cease-fire have failed, and Israeli bombardment and raids on territory where its troops have withdrawn are making it difficult for displaced Gazans to return to abandoned homes.
Israel says it is seeking to eradicate Hamas, which controls the enclave, following an attack by the militant group on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 and taking 253 hostages by Israeli tallies.
Across the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military strikes killed 32 Palestinians and wounded 59 others in the past 24 hours, Palestinian health authorities said. They say more than 34,000 people have been confirmed killed in the sevenmonth war, with thousands more bodies as yet unrecovered.
Turk ‘horrified’ by mass grave reports at Gaza hospitals
U.N. rights chief Volker Turk said Tuesday that he was “horrified” by the destruction of the Nasser and Al Shifa medical facilities in Gaza and reports of mass graves containing hundreds of bodies there, according to a spokesperson.
Palestinian authorities reported finding scores of bodies in mass graves at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis this week after it was abandoned by Israeli troops. Bodies were also reported at the Al Shifa site following an Israeli special forces operation.
“We feel the need to raise the alarm because clearly there have been multiple bodies discovered,” said Ravina Shamdasani, the spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, adding Turk said he had been horrified by the reported mass grave discoveries and the hospitals’ destruction.
“Some of them had their hands tied, which of course indicates serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and these need to be subjected to further investigations.”
She added that the U.N. human rights office was working on corroborating Palestinian officials’ reports that 283 bodies were found at Nasser and 30 at Al Shifa.
According to those reports, some of the bodies were buried beneath piles of waste and included women and older people.
Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Emergency Service said on Tuesday that a total of 310 bodies had been found at one mass grave at Nasser so far and that two other graves had been identified, but not yet excavated.
Israel’s military and its diplomatic mission in Geneva were not immediately available for comment on the Jewish Passover holiday. Israel says Hamas militants use hospitals as bases and that its forces killed around 200 militants at Al Shifa and avoided harming any civilians. Turk, who was represented by Shamdasani at a U.N. news briefing, also decried Israeli strikes on Gaza in recent days, which he said had killed mostly women and children.
He also repeated a warning against a full-scale incursion on Rafah, where some 1.2 million civilians are crowded together, saying this could lead to “further atrocity crimes.”