GAZA: Israel brushed off international calls to renew an expired truce Saturday and pushed on with its devastating bombing campaign against Hamas in densely inhabited Gaza.
Smoke again clouded the sky over the north of the Palestinian territory, whose Hamas government said 240 people had been killed since a pause in hostilities expired early Friday and combat resumed.
According to the United Nations, an estimated 1.7 million people in Gaza, around 80 percent of the population have been displaced by eight weeks of war.
Fadel Naim, chief doctor at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, told AFP that his morgue had received 30 bodies since the morning, including seven children.
READ MORE | Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says fatalities surpassed 15,200, 70% of them women and children
“The planes bombed our houses: three bombs, three houses destroyed,” Nemr al-Bel, 43, told AFP, adding that he had counted 10 dead in his family and “13 more still under the rubble”.
The population is short of food, water, and other essentials, and many homes have been destroyed. UN agencies have declared a humanitarian catastrophe, although some aid trucks did arrive Saturday.
After the truce between Israel and Hamas expired on Friday, Israel had told NGOs not to bring aid convoys across the Rafah border crossing from Egypt, the Palestine Red Crescent Society had said.
But on Saturday, in a social media post, the charity said its Egyptian colleagues had managed to send over several trucks.
Both sides blamed each other for the breakdown of the truce, which had enabled the release of 80 Israeli hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
READ MORE | Bombs are falling on Gaza again. Who are the hostages still remaining in the besieged strip?
During an unprecedented attack on October 7, Hamas fighters broke through Gaza’s militarised border into Israel, killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took around 240 Israelis and foreigners hostage, according to Israeli authorities.
Israel vowed to eliminate Hamas in response and unleashed an air and ground campaign that has killed more than 15,000 people, mostly civilians, the Hamas authorities who run Gaza say.
Since the end of the pause, Israel’s air, naval, and ground forces have attacked more than 400 targets in Gaza, the army said on Saturday. The figure is roughly in line with the daily average number of strikes before the pause, according to military figures released previously.
Warplanes hit “more than 50 targets in an extensive attack in the Khan Yunis area” of Gaza’s south, the military added.
Separately, members of an Israeli armored brigade “eliminated terrorist squads and directed fire against terrorist targets in the north of the Gaza Strip”, the military said.
Since the truce expired, Hamas has fired rockets from Gaza towards Israel.
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