Israeli attacks kill dozens in Gaza, Lebanon as ceasefire remains elusive

Israeli attacks target a school-turned-shelter for displaced Palestinians in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp.

The Israeli military has killed dozens more people in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon as it expands its attacks while ceasefire talks appear to be going nowhere.

At least 55 people were killed across Gaza in the past 24 hours, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry. Fourteen of them were killed in a series of Israeli air strikes and shelling from warships in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp on Friday, medical officials at al-Awda Hospital said.

“People are arriving to the hospital in carts pulled by animals, because it’s quite hard for civil defence and front-line emergency workers to reach the area, as Israeli military drones are actively operating there,” media’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reported from Deir el-Balah as the bombs fell a few kilometres away.

One of the targets in Nuseirat was a school-turned-shelter for displaced Palestinians, bringing the total number of such centres hit since the start of the war to close to 200.

Abu Mohammed al-Taweel, a witness of the Israeli attacks on Nuseirat, said he saw many people killed after multiple family homes were targeted, with a five-month-old baby among the dead.

“The Israelis are eager to kill Palestinian children and women. There are no resistance fighters in the camp. They hit us without any prior warning,” he told media.

“We are here to die. We are ready to die. I was not killed today, but I will definitely be killed tomorrow. No safe places here in the Gaza Strip. Massacres are being committed everywhere.”

The situation continues to be catastrophic in northern Gaza, where the Israeli military keeps up a siege as it blocks humanitarian aid and tries to force Palestinians to flee the area.

“The situation unfolding in North Gaza is apocalyptic,” the heads of major United Nations agencies said on Friday. “The entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence,” added the joint statement from heads of organisations that form the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee.

On Thursday, Israeli forces targeted multiple areas of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in the north, including its stash of medicine delivered five days earlier by the World Health Organization and a water desalination plant.

At least two children died in the intensive care unit after the hospital’s generators stopped and the oxygen station was targeted, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

The official death toll in Gaza now stands at 43,259 people with 101,827 wounded, but the real number of casualties is believed to be much higher.

Attacks on Lebanon’s Baalbek ‘war crimes’

The Israeli military is steadily expanding its assault on Lebanon, as well.

Ten people were killed and 26 wounded in Israeli strikes on the Baalbek-Hermel region in eastern Lebanon on Friday, the country’s Ministry of Public Health said.

This week, the Israeli army issued forced evacuation orders – which amount to effective kill zones – for dozens of villages and towns in southern Lebanon, along with the major ancient cities of Baalbek and Tyre.

Two buildings were levelled in one of the latest Israeli raids near Imam Hussein Mosque in Tyre’s Raml neighbourhood on Friday, with paramedics struggling to pull bodies from under the rubble.

“Ancient Phoenician cities steeped in history are in deep peril of being left in ruins,” Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the United Nation’s special coordinator for Lebanon, said about the threat posed by Israeli attacks for Tyre and Baalbek.

Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati has called the attacks on those cities and Israel’s evacuation orders “war crimes”, along with other killings and destruction, as he maintains contact with counterparts from the United States and the region to achieve a ceasefire.

Even as US and Lebanese officials initially expressed hope this week that a Lebanon ceasefire could be reached, there was no sign of a breakthrough after Washington’s envoys returned home following talks in Israel.

Mikati said expanding attacks “confirm the Israeli enemy’s rejection of all efforts being made to secure a ceasefire”.

Israel has demanded Hezbollah’s withdrawal from Lebanon’s southern borders and its disarming, or to reserve the right to carry out attacks in Lebanon.