No hope in sight to end Gaza bloodshed

AFP | Ramallah

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Israeli forces killed six Palestinians in the occupied West Bank as the death toll in Gaza yesterday surpassed 10,000 people after nearly one month of bombardment by Israel whose offensive against the Palestinians showed signs of intensifying.

The Palestinian health ministry reported that four people, aged 20 to 25, were killed and a 14-year-old injured by Israeli army fire in Tulkarem.

The Palestinian ministry condemned the “assassinations carried out by the Israeli occupying forces” in the city in the northwest of West Bank, a Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967.

According to the ministry, more than 150 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or in attacks by settlers in the West Bank since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7.

The Israeli army said yesterday it had pounded Gaza with “significant” strikes on 450 targets, having said last week it had already hit over 12,000.

The Palestian health ministry had initially reported three deaths. Witnesses in Tulkarem told AFP that three armed men were killed when their car was intercepted by undercover Israeli agents.

Casualties The agents “shot at them in a street in the north of the city and the three men died”, one of the witnesses said on condition of anonymity. Social media images showed gun-wielding soldiers in military gear around an intercepted vehicle.

In Beit Fajar, in the southern West Bank, an 18-year-old Palestinian was “killed by a shot in the head from the Israeli army”, the ministry said.

Earlier, the Palestinian health ministry said Israeli forces killed a young man and seriously injured three others in the town of Halhul, in the south of the West Bank.

Catastrophe “The unfolding catastrophe makes the need for a humanitarian ceasefire more urgent with every passing hour,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters at UN headquarters.

The dead in Gaza include more than 4,000 children, the health ministry said.

Some 292 people were killed in a barrage overnight that hit two paediatric hospitals and Gaza’s only psychiatric hospital, it said.

“These are massacres! They destroyed three houses over the heads of their inhabitants - women and children,” Mahmud Meshmesh, resident of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, told AFP.