Israel’s military killed 17 Palestinians in multiple airstrikes across the Gaza Strip on Thursday after having agreed yesterday to a US-France-brokered ceasefire deal with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israeli forces escalated their bombardment of central areas, targeting refugee camps and hospitals, and deploying tanks even deeper into the north and south of Gaza, Reuters reported.
The first of several airstrikes killed six people after destroying a house and landing near the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahiya, north of the Strip. Another Israeli strike killed four others, targeting a motorcycle in Khan Younis, in the south of Gaza.
Israeli bombers also targeted the Nuseirat refugee camps and a nearby residential building with a series of airstrikes. The bombings killed at least seven people, health officials said.
Medics said that Israeli tanks killed a woman and a child in Nuseirat describing “disproportionate shelling” targeting unarmed civilian refugees. An airstrike also killed five more in a house nearby.
While the Israeli Defense Forces typically claim their attacks target “Hamas militants,” Israel has not commented on this latest scourge of attacks.
According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), 70 percent of the people who had been killed in Gaza as of September 2, 2024, are women and children.
The OHCHR stated that monitoring Israel’s “grave violations” is now difficult due to “access constraints, a high level of insecurity, and threats and direct attacks also on United Nations personnel, monitors, and humanitarian actors.”
The humanitarian toll is likely to be worse than current estimates after a deep reassessment of Israel’s genocidal campaign is conducted.
On November 21, the International Criminal Court found reasonable grounds to believe that Israel has used “starvation” as a “tool of war” and issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
The Court said it had found reasonable grounds to believe that “both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies . . . .”
A doctor in the Gaza Strip said that a starving Palestinian family had been food poisoned by eating bits of C4 explosives reportedly left by Israeli forces near water and Pepsi “in an envelope,” that they mistook for cheese. He told Middle East Eye, “They eat anything; sometimes they eat the leaves. . . . They are struggling for life.”