Israel launches deadly Gaza strikes as Middle East tensions rise
- Israeli bombing killed dozens of people overnight in Gaza, as regional tensions have surged over the almost three-months-old war
- Tensions also surged with Israel’s neighbour Lebanon, where a strike in Beirut, assumed to have been carried out by Israel, killed a Hamas deputy leader
Israeli bombing killed dozens of people overnight in Gaza, the health ministry of the Hamas-run Palestinian territory said Thursday, as regional tensions have surged over the almost three-months-old war.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was due to head to the Middle East, a US official said on condition of anonymity, the top diplomat’s fourth trip to the region since the Hamas attack of October 7 triggered the bloodiest ever Gaza war.
The Israeli military, in its campaign to destroy the Islamist militant group, has reported more strikes in and around Gaza City, now a largely devastated urban combat zone, and Khan Yunis, the biggest urban centre in the besieged territory’s south.
The Gaza health ministry reported “dozens of martyrs and more than 100 wounded in the continued barbaric aerial and artillery bombardment of citizens’ homes in the Gaza Strip”.
There were around 30 people. All of a sudden their houses fell on them … What have these children done?
In a new development on the battlefront, an Israeli tank was seen at the entrance to the Al-Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza, signalling a new deep incursion which is likely to bring more displacement and more fighting.
Israeli tanks have advanced into Al-Maghazi from the east, but with the push from the west they appear to be trying to encircle the camp, home to families and descendants of people who fled the 1948 war around the establishment of the Israeli state.
