Israel said yesterday it had suffered its heaviest combat losses in more than 30 days after an ambush in the ruins of Gaza City as it faces increasing diplomatic isolation as the death toll rises and the humanitarian disaster worsens.
Intense fighting is ongoing in both northern and western Gaza, a day after the United Nations called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. US President Joe Biden said that the "indiscriminate" bombing is costing Israel international support.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday that the army will continue fighting despite international pressure for a ceasefire. "We continue until the end, until victory, until Hamas is destroyed," he told the soldiers in Gaza in a radio address. "I say this in the face of great pain, but also great international pressure. Nothing will stop us".
Israel had mostly global support when it launched a campaign to destroy Hamas after the group's fighters stormed the border fence on October 7, killing 1200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and taking 240 hostages.
However, in the meantime, Israel razed most of the enclave to the ground, the Reuters agency points out. The Gaza Ministry of Health announced yesterday that at least 18.608 people were killed and 50.594 were injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. Thousands are feared to be under the rubble or beyond the reach of rescuers.
In Rafah, in the south of Gaza where hundreds of thousands of people have sought refuge, the bodies of family members killed in an overnight airstrike were yesterday wrapped in white sheets and exposed in the rain. Among them were several children, while the body of the newborn was wrapped in a pink blanket.
Ahmed Abu Rejash claimed the bodies of his nephews, aged five and seven. As he walked through the streets carrying one of the girls crying, he exclaimed: "These are children." Kids! Do they kill anyone but children? No! These are innocents! They killed them with their dirty hands!”.
After a seven-day ceasefire collapsed in early December, Israeli forces expanded their ground campaign from the north of the Gaza Strip to the south with incursions into the southern capital of Khan Younis.
Meanwhile, fighting intensified in the ruins of northern Gaza, where Israel previously said it had largely achieved its military objectives.
Israel announced that ten Israeli soldiers were killed within 24 hours, including a lieutenant commanding a forward base and a second lieutenant commanding a detachment. It is the heaviest loss for Israeli forces since 15 soldiers were killed on October 31.
Hamas said it showed Israeli forces could never subdue Gaza. "The longer you stay there, the more you will die and lose," Hamas said.
Hospitals in northern Gaza have largely ceased to function. In the south, they are crowded with the dead and wounded, reports Reuters.
"Doctors like me jump over children's bodies to treat children who are going to die," said Dr. Chris Hook, a British doctor who is deployed as part of the Doctors Without Borders mission at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, for the British agency.
The General Assembly vote demanding a cease-fire is not legally binding, but it is the strongest sign yet of declining international support for Israel's actions. Three quarters of the 193 members voted for the resolution, and only eight countries joined the United States and Israel in voting against it.
Before the vote, Biden said that Israel still has the support of "most of the world" in the fight against Hamas. "However, they are starting to lose that support because of the indiscriminate bombing they carry out," he said at the donor dinner.
In the most obvious indication of the divide between US and Israeli leaders so far, Biden said that Netanyahu needs to change his hardline government and that ultimately Israel "cannot say no" to an independent Palestinian state.
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