7 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since October 36.171 last year, the Ministry of Health in that Palestinian enclave announced today.
The Ministry's announcement states that at least 81,42 people were injured in the attacks, Anadolia reports.
"24 people were killed and 75 injured in Israeli attacks in the last 384 hours," the Ministry announced.
It is said that many people are still trapped under the rubble and on the roads and that rescuers cannot reach them.
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The Palestinian health minister said there was no indication from Israel that the Rafah crossing, which was used to bring in basic humanitarian and medical supplies, could be opened soon.
"Since it is closed, we have no indication that the Israelis would like it to open soon," the minister, Majed Abu Ramadan, told reporters on the sidelines of the World Health Assembly in Geneva, according to Reuters.
Rafah was the main entry point for humanitarian aid before Israel stepped up its military offensive on the Gaza border earlier this month and took control of the crossing from the Palestinian side.
The Israeli army controls 75 percent of the Phildelphi Corridor, a buffer zone between Gaza and Egypt, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's national security adviser, Thachi Hanegbi, said, according to Reuters.
"Inside Gaza, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) now controls 75 percent of the Philadelphia corridor and I believe that in time they will control it all. Together with the Egyptians, we must ensure that arms smuggling is prevented," Khan told Israeli public television.
Hanegbi added that he expects the fighting in Gaza to continue at least through 2024.
Israeli tanks continued today, for the second day in a row, test attacks across Rafah, as Washington said they were not close to a major ground incursion into the city in the southern Gaza Strip that should be avoided.
Agencies report that Israeli tanks reached the center of Rafah for the first time on Tuesday after heavy bombardment overnight, defying an order by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to end the assault on Rafah, one of the last refuges for displaced Palestinians.
Israel's closest ally the United States reiterated its opposition to a major Israeli ground offensive in Rafah, but on Tuesday expressed its belief that no such operation is underway, Reuters reported.
Eyewitnesses said that, unlike the ground offensive in the rest of Gaza, Israeli tanks are carrying out attacks in Tel al-Sultan in the western part of Rafah and Jibna near Shabura in the center and then withdrawing to positions near the border with Egypt.
The military wing of Hamas and Islamic Jihad announced that they countered Israeli forces with anti-tank rockets and mortar missiles, and that they caused explosions of previously planted explosive devices.
The Israeli army announced that three of its soldiers were killed and three were seriously wounded today in a battle in the south, but did not reveal details.
Public service Khan reported that soldiers were wounded by an explosive device activated in a building in Rafa.
Palestinian health officials said several people were wounded this morning by Israeli fire in the eastern Rafah area and some shops were set on fire.
Residents said that incessant Israeli bombardment during the night destroyed many apartments, where most of the residents fled after Israeli orders to evacuate.
Robotic armored vehicles were also said to have been seen opening fire with automatic weapons in some parts of the city, where internet and mobile phone communications were intermittently disrupted amid fierce ground and air attacks.
In northern Gaza, tanks shelled several neighborhoods in Gaza City and forces pushed deeper into Jabalia, the largest of the eight major refugee camps.
Eyewitnesses said that large blocks of flats were destroyed.
US-made weapons were used in a deadly Israeli attack on a camp for displaced Palestinians in Rafah, according to an analysis by CNN and explosives experts of video footage from the site.
At least 45 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, were killed and more than 200 injured when a fire broke out after an Israeli strike on Sunday in the southernmost city of the Gaza Strip, according to the Ministry of Health and the Palestinian Ambulance Service there.
Videos posted on social media show part of a GBU-39 small diameter bomb (SDB), four explosives experts who reviewed the video told CNN.
The GBU-39 is manufactured by Boeing and is a high-precision munition "designed to attack strategic targets" and result in little collateral damage, expert Chris Cobb-Smith said.
However, he added that the use of any ammunition, even of that size, always poses a risk in a densely populated area.
Former demining team member Trevor Ball also identified the GBU-39 fragment in the video.
The identification of the munitions is consistent with the assertion of Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari at a briefing on the tragedy on Tuesday.
He said that in the attack, which targeted two Hamas commanders, ammunition with small warheads of 17 kilograms of explosives was used, and that these bombs are the smallest ammunition that Israeli planes can use.
The serial numbers of the remnants of the bombs match the numbers of the manufacturer of the GBU-39 parts in California, which is further evidence that the bombs are of American manufacture, CNN reported.
The Pentagon declined to comment on the report and suggested seeking a statement from Israel on the operation.
CNN reminds that the US has long been the largest supplier of weapons to Israel and that support has continued despite growing political pressure on the administration of US President Joseph Biden over the offensive in Gaza.
Israel stepped up its assault on Rafah, where some 1,3 million Palestinians have taken refuge, before the army launched a military operation in the city in early May.
It drew strong international condemnation and UN agencies, aid organizations and several governments called on Israel to immediately end its offensive.
President Biden, however, is not changing his policy towards Israel.
It's a hint that the deadly attack on Rafah has not yet crossed a red line in the US's view to trigger a shift in US support, even though Biden said earlier this month that he would not allow certain US weapons to be used in a major offensive in the city.
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Algerian UN Ambassador Amar Benjama has announced that his country will present a draft resolution to the UN Security Council (SC) to end the killing in Rafah as the Israeli army attacks Hamas operatives in the overcrowded city in the southern Gaza Strip.
Algeria demanded that an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council be held on Tuesday after the attack on Sunday, the target of which were two members of Hamas, which caused a fire in a nearby camp where Palestinians displaced by the conflict in other parts of Gaza took shelter and 45 people died.
"It will be a short, decisive text to stop the killing in Rafah," the Algerian ambassador told reporters last night after the SB meeting, France Press reported.
He did not say when the draft resolution would be voted on, and China's ambassador to the UN, Fu Kong, expressed hope that it would be "as soon as possible."
"It is time for the Council to take action. It is a matter of life and death. It is a matter of urgency," French Ambassador to the UN Nicolas de Riviere said before the meeting.
Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry, meanwhile, issued perhaps its harshest statement against Israel since the start of the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, accusing the country of "continuous genocidal massacres" as it targets "the tents of defenseless Palestinian refugees in Rafah."
The statement added that Riyadh considers Israel responsible for "what is happening in Rafah and other occupied Palestinian territories", Israeli media reported.
Riyadh negotiated the normalization of relations with Israel before the outbreak of war, and has stepped up its rhetoric against the Jewish state since the talks broke down and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused a request to pave the way for a future Palestinian state.
The Saudi ministry stated that Israel clearly continues to violate all international and humanitarian resolutions, law and norms and, as it assessed, "increases the scale of the unprecedented humanitarian disaster experienced by the Palestinian people."
Israel's military has launched an investigation into the attack in Rafah that killed dozens of civilians and said a hidden arms cache may have been the cause of a "secondary explosion" and deadly fire in Rafah, and that the airstrike targeted a neighboring area with small-caliber weapons, which it just wouldn't cause that kind of fire.
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The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) called today for a ceasefire and unimpeded humanitarian access to the Gaza Strip, where millions of people are facing increasing hunger, Reuters reports.
The war-torn enclave is suffering a humanitarian catastrophe nearly seven months after Israel launched a devastating offensive in response to Hamas attacks on October 7 that killed 1.200 people in Israel.
"We desperately need a political solution that will allow us to have a ceasefire in order to get aid," IFRC president Kate Forbes told Reuters in an interview.
"We are ready to make a difference. We have to have access, and to have access we have to have a ceasefire," said Forbes, who in December became the second woman ever to head the world's largest humanitarian network.
The President of the IFRC is a volunteer position and oversees a network of 191 organizations that work during and after disasters and wars, such as the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, which has emergency teams in Gaza.
Forbes said she saw the "horrendous" situation in the town of Rafah during a visit in February, months before Israel launched a military assault on the southern Gaza city, where more than a million Palestinians who fled attacks on other parts of the enclave have been hiding.
"There wasn't enough shelter. There wasn't enough water, there weren't enough sanitary toilets. We had a hospital with no equipment... and unfortunately what I feared happened, that there wouldn't be enough food," said Forbes.
Reuters reported that prospects for a resumption of mediated ceasefire talks in Gaza rose over the weekend, even as Israel continued its offensive in Gaza to eliminate the Palestinian Islamist militant group Hamas after the United Nations' (UN) top court ordered Israel to do so on Friday. to stop attacking Rafa.
Hamas denied reports that talks would resume earlier this week.
Both sides blamed the other for the standoff.
Israel has said it cannot accept Hamas's demand to end the war, while the Palestinians want Palestinian prisoners to be freed.
"I'm asking the governments of all sides to negotiate a ceasefire so we can get help," Forbes said.
"My job is to ensure that when it (the cease-fire) comes, we can provide the help that is necessary. And that's why they have to do their job so I can do mine," she added.
A temporary dock built by the United States of America that has been receiving humanitarian aid for starving Palestinians for less than two weeks will be removed from the Gaza coast for repairs after it was damaged by rough seas and weather, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
Over the next two days, the dock will be pulled from the beach and sent to the southern Israeli city of Ashdod, where it will be repaired by US Central Command, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters. She said the repairs would take "at least more than a week" and then the pier would have to be anchored back to Gaza Beach.
"Since it's been up and running, it's been working, and we just had kind of an unfortunate combination of weather storms that made it inoperable for a little while," Singh said. "Hopefully in a little over a week we'll be back up and running."
The pier, which has been used to transport humanitarian aid arriving by sea, is one of the few ways free food and other supplies reach Palestinians who the UN says are on the brink of starvation amid the nearly eight-month war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The two main crossings in southern Gaza, Egypt's Rafah and Israel's Kerem Shalom, are either down or largely inaccessible to the UN due to nearby fighting as Israel pushes further into the Rafah. The port and two crossing points from Israel in northern Gaza are where most of the humanitarian aid that has arrived in the past three weeks has entered.
American officials have repeatedly emphasized that the port cannot provide the amount of aid needed by the starving residents of Gaza, and that more checkpoints for humanitarian trucks need to be opened. At maximum capacity, the port would bring in enough food for 500.000 Gazans, and US officials have stressed the need for open land crossings for the remaining 1,8 million.
The US also planned to continue airdropping food, which also cannot meet all needs. Israel's deepening offensive in the southern city of Rafah has prevented aid shipments from passing through the crossing there, which is a key source of fuel and food coming into Gaza. Israel says it is bringing aid through another border crossing, Kerem Shalom, but humanitarian organizations say Israeli military operations are making it difficult for them to pick up aid for distribution.
The war in the Gaza Strip began when militants from Hamas, an organization designated as a terrorist organization by the US and the European Union, launched an unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, killing around 1.200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli officials.
Hamas also kidnapped about 250 people, of whom 100 are still trapped in the Gaza Strip.
Israel then launched an offensive on Gaza that has so far killed at least 35.800 people - two-thirds of them women and children - and wounded more than 80.000, according to the local health ministry, which is controlled by Hamas.
The war has pushed most of Gaza's population to the brink of starvation, the UN says. Numerous hospitals were destroyed, and those that were not destroyed do not have enough fuel for generators and other basic necessities.
(Radio Free Europe)
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