ISRAEL warplanes unleashed a new series of heavy airstrikes at several locations in Gaza City early Monday, hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled the fourth war with Gaza’s Hamas rulers would rage on.
Explosions rocked the city from north to south for 10 minutes in an attack that was heavier, on a wider area and lasted longer than a series of air raids 24 hours earlier in which 42 Palestinians were killed — the deadliest single attack in the latest round of violence between Israel and the Hamas militant group that rules Gaza. The earlier Israeli airstrikes flattened three buildings.
The Israeli military said it attacked the homes of nine Hamas commanders across Gaza. There were no immediate reports of injuries, and in the predawn darkness there was little information on the extent of damage inflicted early Monday.
Local media reports said the main coastal road west of the city, security compounds and open spaces were hit in the latest raids. The power distribution company said airstrikes damaged a line feeding electricity from the only power plant to large parts of southern Gaza City.
In a televised address on Sunday, Netanyahu said Israel’s attacks were continuing at “full-force” and would “take time.“ Israel “wants to levy a heavy price” on the Hamas militant group, he said, flanked by his defense minister and political rival, Benny Gantz, in a show of unity.
Hamas also pressed on, launching rockets from civilian areas in Gaza toward civilian areas in Israel. One slammed into a synagogue in the southern city of Ashkelon hours before evening services for the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, Israeli emergency services said. No injuries were reported.
In the Israeli air assault early Sunday, families were buried under piles of cement rubble and twisted rebar. A yellow canary lay crushed on the ground. Shards of glass and debris covered streets blocks away from the major downtown thoroughfare where the three buildings were hit over the course of five minutes around 1 a.m.
The hostilities have repeatedly escalated over the past week, marking the worst fighting in the territory that is home to 2 million Palestinians since Israel and Hamas’ devastating 2014 war.
“I have not seen this level of destruction through my 14 years of work,” said Samir al-Khatib, an emergency rescue official in Gaza. “Not even in the 2014 war.”
Rescuers furiously dug through the rubble using excavators and bulldozers amid clouds of heavy dust. One shouted, “Can you hear me?” into a hole. Minutes later, first responders pulled a survivor out. The Gaza Health Ministry said 16 women and 10 children were among those killed, with more than 50 people wounded.
Haya Abdelal, 21, who lives in a building next to one that was destroyed, said she was sleeping when the airstrikes sent her fleeing into the street. She accused Israel of not giving its usual warning to residents to leave before launching such an attack.
“We are tired,” she said, “We need a truce. We can’t bear it anymore.”
The Israeli army spokesperson’s office said the strike targeted Hamas “underground military infrastructure.”
As a result of the strike, “the underground facility collapsed, causing the civilian houses’ foundations above them to collapse as well, leading to unintended casualties,” it said.
Among those reported killed was Dr. Ayman Abu Al-Ouf, the head of the internal medicine department at Shifa Hospital and a senior member of the hospital’s coronavirus management committee. Two of Abu Al-Ouf’s teenage children and two other family members were also buried under the rubble.
The death of the 51-year-old physician “was a huge loss at a very sensitive time,” said Mohammed Abu Selmia, the director of Shifa.
Gaza’s health care system, already gutted by an Israeli and Egyptian blockade imposed in 2007 after Hamas seized power from rival Palestinian forces, had been struggling with a surge in coronavirus infections even before the latest conflict.
Israel’s airstrikes have leveled a number of Gaza City’s tallest buildings, which Israel alleges contained Hamas military infrastructure. Among them was the building housing The Associated Press Gaza office and those of other media outlets.
Sally Buzbee, the AP’s executive editor, called for an independent investigation into the airstrike that destroyed the AP office on Saturday.
Netanyahu alleged that Hamas military intelligence was operating inside the building and said Sunday any evidence would be shared through intelligence channels. Neither the White House nor the State Department would say if any had been seen.
“It’s a perfectly legitimate target,” Netanyahu told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Asked if he had provided any evidence of Hamas’ presence in the building in a call Saturday with U.S. President Joe Biden, Netanyahu said: “We pass it through our intelligence people.”
Buzbee called for any such evidence to be laid out. “We are in a conflict situation,” Buzbee said. “We do not take sides in that conflict. We heard Israelis say they have evidence; we don’t know what that evidence is.”
Meanwhile, media watchdog Reporters Without Borders asked the International Criminal Court on Sunday to investigate Israel’s bombing of the AP building and others housing media organizations as a possible war crime.
The Paris-based group said in a letter to the court’s chief prosecutor that the offices of 23 international and local media organizations have been destroyed over the past six days. It said the attacks serve “to reduce, if not neutralize, the media’s capacity to inform the public.”
The AP had operated from the building for 15 years, including through three previous wars between Israel and Hamas. The news agency’s cameras, operating from its top floor office and roof terrace, offered 24-hour live shots as militant rockets arched toward Israel and Israeli airstrikes hammered the city and its surroundings.
“We think it’s appropriate at this point for there to be an independent look at what happened yesterday — an independent investigation,” Buzbee said.
The latest outbreak of violence began in east Jerusalem last month, when Palestinians clashed with police in response to Israeli police tactics during Ramadan and the threatened eviction of dozens of Palestinian families by Jewish settlers. A focus of the clashes was the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a frequent flashpoint located on a hilltop compound revered by both Muslims and Jews.
Hamas began firing rockets toward Jerusalem on Monday, triggering the Israeli assault on Gaza.
At least 188 Palestinians have been killed in hundreds of airstrikes in Gaza, including 55 children and 33 women, with 1,230 people wounded. Eight people in Israel have been killed in some of the 3,100 rocket attacks launched from Gaza, including a 5-year-old boy and a soldier.
Hamas and the Islamic Jihad militant group have acknowledged 20 fighters killed in the fighting. Israel says the real number is far higher and has released the names and photos of two dozen alleged operatives it says were “eliminated.”
The assault has displaced some 34,000 Palestinians from their homes, U.N. Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland told an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, where eight foreign ministers spoke about the conflict.
Efforts by China, Norway and Tunisia to get the U.N. body to issue a statement, including a call for the cessation of hostilities, have been blocked by the United States, which, according to diplomats, is concerned it could interfere with diplomatic efforts to stop the violence.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Al-Malki urged the Security Council to take action to end Israeli attacks. Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, urged the council to condemn Hamas’ “indiscriminate and unprovoked attacks.”
The turmoil has also fueled protests in the occupied West Bank and stoked violence within Israel between its Jewish and Arab citizens, with clashes and vigilante attacks on people and property.
On Sunday, a driver rammed into an Israeli checkpoint in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where Palestinian families have been threatened with eviction , injuring six officers before police shot and killed the attacker, Israeli police said.
The violence also sparked pro-Palestinian protests in cities across Europe and the United States.
Israel appears to have stepped up strikes in recent days to inflict as much damage as possible on Hamas as international mediators work to end the fighting and stave off an Israeli ground invasion in Gaza.
The Israeli military said it destroyed the home Sunday of Gaza’s top Hamas leader, Yahiyeh Sinwar, in the southern town of Khan Younis. It was the third such attack in the last two days on the homes of senior Hamas leaders, who have gone underground.
In a new development, as Henry Sasin watched the news unfold of Arab and Jewish riots across Israeli cities, he received a widely circulated message on his phone.
“I am honoured to invite you to take part in a mass murder of Arabs,” it read.
Mr Sasin, a Christian Arab, read on.
“This will take place at 6pm today in Bat Yam promenade,” the message, forwarded by a concerned friend, continued. “Please come with the appropriate equipment – swords, knives, rocks, pistols.”
His heart sank when he saw a reference to a seaside shop called “Victory”. It was his own ice cream parlour.
By 6.20pm, videos were already being posted on social media that showed a gang of rioters kicking down the Victory parlour’s railings, smashing its windows and destroying the shop counters.
It was just one violent attack among dozens across Israeli cities this week, where Jewish and Arab extremists have been torching each others’ shops, synagogues, schools and cars.
While the rockets raining on Gaza and Israel are in some ways a familiar sight, sectarian clashes inside Israel this week have come as a shock to many. They show just how far Arab-Israeli relations have deteriorated.
The violence has become so intense that Reuven Rivlin, the president, has described the situation as a “civil war,” while prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared there was “no greater threat” to Israeli security.
Mr Netanyahu has vowed to restore order and is reportedly considering the deployment of military forces inside Israel.
The morning after the attack, Mr Sasin returned to his ice cream parlour and inspected the damage, as his staff began clearing up broken glass.
“I saw that everything was broken, even the cashier, and all the glass windows had been smashed in,” he told the Sunday Telegraph.
Asked why he thought his shop had been targeted, he simply replied: “Because I am a Christian Arab.”
He was one of the lucky ones. Footage of a far-Right Israeli mob attacking a man they believed to be an Arab was aired live on television during the riot.
The shocking images showed a man being forcibly removed from his car and beaten by a crowd of dozens until he lost consciousness.
Far-right lawmaker Betzalel Smotrich, head of the “Religious Zionism” party, said he was “ashamed” of the “atrocious cruelty” of the attack.
“Jewish brothers, stop! We cannot under any circumstances allow ourselves to take part in violent acts,” he said.
Israel’s chief rabbi Yitzhak Yossef called for an end to attacks by Jews.
The riots which have swept across the country this week are different from what has come before.
They are not being waged, as is often the case, between settlers and Palestinians in the disputed territory of the West Bank, but in Israel’s own cities – including the northern tourism hotspots of Acre and Haifa.
And they suggest that an alarming new front is emerging in the world’s oldest conflict.
In Acre this week, Arab extremists torched the popular Uri Buri fish restaurant, while in the city of Lod, an industrial city near Tel Aviv with drab rows of grey homes with barred windows, where 40 percent of the population is Arab, two synagogues were set alight.
The Telegraph visited one of the synagogues on Friday, where the interior was blackened by fire and the floor was covered in debris.
One Jewish resident said they would not only repair but expand the synagogue in defiance of Arab rioters.
Police said the inter-community violence has reached a point not seen in decades, with security forces “literally preventing pogroms from taking place”.
After the synagogue in Lod was torched a state of emergency and a curfew were declared, and one person was in critical condition after being shot by Arab residents.
Over 150 arrests were made in Lod alone and Arab towns in northern Israel, police said on Thursday.
A gunman also opened fire at a group of patrolling armed Jews on Thursday, wounding one person.
Also on Thursday, a Jewish family was attacked in the Arab city of Umm al-Fahm before being rescued by police, and an officer was shot and wounded near Ramla, another mixed city near Lod, police said.
Tensions were first fuelled by the threat of Palestinian evictions in East Jerusalem and police raids on Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina.
But they have escalated dramatically since Hamas launched rockets at Israel and Israel struck back with air and artillery bombardments on Gaza
Back at Mr Sasin’s ice cream shop in Bat Yam, residents were approaching him outside to commiserate his loss – both Arabs and Jews.
One Jewish man, who was struggling to contain his outrage at the ice cream vendor’s ordeal, said he was utterly disgusted by the attack.
As for Mr Sasin, he said his anger lied elsewhere. “I am not angry with any person,” he said, before returning to repairs on his ravaged ice cream parlour.
“I am angry at the Israeli government. It is not teaching co-existence and respect for others.”
Additional reports by AP, The Telegraph
