Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip are continuing unabated, raising fears of a flare-up in Lebanon. On May 7, Israeli troops launched a ground offensive in the southern city of Rafah, which Israel then presented as the last major Hamas stronghold. But fighting has since intensified in several other regions, particularly in the north.
Since Thursday, the Israeli army has been carrying out a military operation in Shujaiya, an eastern neighborhood of Gaza City. Civil Defense reported on Friday “numerous deaths” and the flight of “tens of thousands of civilians”, after a call from the army to evacuate the neighborhood.
“In the streets, people were panicking, they were terrified (…) Everyone was leaving Shujaiya,” says Samah Hajaj, 42. “We don’t know why they (Israeli soldiers, editor’s note) entered Shujaiya since they had already destroyed the houses there.” During the night and on Saturday morning, journalists present on the scene heard explosions, airstrikes and gunfire coming from this area.
Also in Gaza City, Civil Defense said four bodies and six wounded had been excavated from the rubble of a building hit by an Israeli strike in the al-Sedra area. In the central Palestinian territory, residents cleared rubble in the Maghazi refugee camp after an overnight strike on a house hit a medical center. “The pharmacy, ophthalmology department and emergency department were completely destroyed. All that remains is debris,” said Tarek Qandeel, director of the center.
Further south, five bodies were discovered following a bombing on displaced people’s tents in the al-Mawasi sector, near Rafah, according to doctors.
Witnesses reported deaths and injuries among displaced people in the Shakush camp, west of Rafah, after a new incursion by the Israeli army and shooting. A source at the Nasser Medical Center in Khan Yunis said it had received four corpses from western Rafah.
The offensive on the Gaza Strip has so far killed 37,834 people, mostly civilians, according to data from the Hamas-led Gaza government’s health ministry. The war has caused a humanitarian catastrophe in the small, besieged Palestinian territory of 2.4 million people, more than half of whom have been displaced: food and water are in short supply and the health system is in tatters.
A total of 32 hospitals out of 36 in the Gaza Strip have been damaged since October 7, and among them 20 are now out of service, according to figures released Friday by the World Health Organization (WHO). An UNRWA mission manager, Louise Wateridge, described Friday as “disastrous” the living conditions in the Palestinian territory, where humanitarian aid is arriving in trickles. Residents live in ruins of buildings or tents around a gigantic pile of waste, she announced to the press.
