GAZA
Israel bombed Gaza on Saturday as the United Nations warned the Palestinian territory has become “uninhabitable” after three months of fighting that threatens to engulf the wider region.
AFP correspondents reported Israeli strikes early Saturday on Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter from the fighting.
Civilians continue to bear the brunt of the conflict, with the UN warning of a deepening humanitarian crisis as famine looms and disease spreads.
Abu Mohammed, 60, who fled to Rafah from the central Bureij refugee camp, told AFP Gaza’s future was “dark and gloomy and very difficult”.
With much of the territory already reduced to rubble, UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said Friday that “Gaza has simply become uninhabitable”.
The UN’s children’s agency warned that clashes, malnutrition and a lack of health services had created “a deadly cycle that threatens over 1.1 million children” in Gaza.
Israeli forces were continuing “to fight in all parts of the Gaza Strip, in the north, centre and south”, military spokesman Daniel Hagari said late Friday.
Hagari said Israeli forces were maintaining a “very high state of readiness” near the border with Lebanon following the killing of a top Hamas commander in a strike in Beirut. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the strike, but a US defence official told AFP that Israel carried it out.
The war in Gaza was triggered by an unprecedented attack on Israel launched by Hamas on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of around 1,140 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
The resistance fighters also took around 250 hostages, 132 of whom remain in captivity, according to Israel, including at least 24 believed to have been killed.
In response, Israel has launched a relentless bombardment and ground invasion that have killed at least 22,600 people, most of them women and children, according to the Gaza health ministry.
AFP correspondents reported Friday that Israeli strikes had hit the southern cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah as well as parts of central Gaza. A hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah reported that 35 people had been killed there.
The Israeli army said its forces had “struck over 100 targets” across Gaza in the previous 24 hours, including military positions, rocket launch sites and weapons depots.
The health ministry in Gaza said it had recorded 162 deaths over the same period.
A fighter jet bombed the central area of Bureij overnight, killing “an armed terrorist cell”, the army said, after what it described as an attempted attack on an Israeli tank. The Israeli army also claimed to have “killed a number of Palestinian militants” in clashes in Khan Yunis, a city that has become a major battleground
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