Gaza’s civil defence agency said on Saturday that a sweeping Israeli military operation has killed more than 400 people in two weeks in the territory’s north, where Israel kept hammering militant targets while fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Hamas ally Hezbollah has vowed to intensify attacks on Israel weeks into an all-out war that erupted on September 23, launching on Saturday rocket barrages at Israel’s north, where rescuers said one man was killed by shrapnel.
According to the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a drone attack from Lebanon targeted his residence in the coastal town of Caesarea, though the family were not there at the time and there were no injuries.
The latest attacks come as Hamas, Hezbollah and allied Iran-backed groups in the region have vowed to keep fighting after Israeli troops killed the Palestinian movement’s leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza, more than a year into the war triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.
Analysts said Sinwar, accused of masterminding the October 7 attack on Israel, was pivotal to ending the Gaza war and securing the release of Israeli hostages.
Israel, vowing to stop Hamas militants from regrouping in northern Gaza, launched a major air and ground assault on October 6, tightening its siege on the war-battered area and sending tens of thousands of people fleeing.
Civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said that “we have recovered more than 400 martyrs from the various targeted areas in the northern Gaza Strip”, including Jabalia and its refugee camp, since the Israeli operation began.
The actual death toll may be higher, Bassal told AFP, as “there are dozens of bodies scattered in the streets of Jabalia”.
Contacted by AFP, the Israeli military said it was looking into the civil defence agency’s reports out of Gaza, including that an overnight air raid on Jabalia killed 33 people.
The violence has dashed hopes Sinwar’s death on Wednesday might bring the war closer to an end.
“We always thought that when this moment arrived… our lives would return to normal,” 21-year-old Gazan Jemaa Abu Mendi said.
“But unfortunately,” Mendi said, “the war has not stopped, and the killings continue unabated.”
– ‘Lost everything’ –
The unprecedented Hamas attack last year that sparked the war resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Out of 251 hostages taken on October 7, 97 are still held in Gaza including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s campaign to crush Hamas and bring back the hostages has killed 42,519 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, figures the UN considers reliable.
Israel has faced mounting criticism over the civilian toll and lack of food and aid reaching Gaza, where the UN has warned of famine.
As fighting raged on in northern Gaza, witnesses told AFP that air strikes continued to pound the area during the day.
Medics said Israeli forces were shelling the Indonesian Hospital in north Gaza. The military reported troops operating near the facility but said “no intentional fire” was directed at it.
The Israeli army said it had killed “dozens of terrorists” in the operation since October 6, which aid agencies warned was leading to a fresh humanitarian crisis.
“Another 20,000 people were forced to flee Jabalia camp” on Friday, said the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
On social media platform X, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini reported “critical shortage of fuel and medical supplies… in the last remaining hospitals”.
Israel has said its forces were targeting “terrorists embedded inside civilian areas”, while accusing Hamas of preventing residents from fleeing.
– Strikes on Lebanon –
Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose country supports Hamas, said the regional “resistance front” against Israel “will not end at all with the martyrdom of Sinwar”, the latest in a series of Tehran-aligned militant leader killings.
In Lebanon, where Israel last month ramped up air raids and deployed ground forces after nearly a year of cross-border exchanges with Hezbollah, state media said a strike hit the group’s south Beirut stronghold on Saturday.
AFP footage showed plumes of smoke rising over the area, less than an hour after the Israeli military issued an evacuation order.
A strike on the eastern Bekaa Valley killed four people including a town mayor, said Lebanon’s official National News Agency, and the health ministry reported two dead in an Israeli attack on a vital highway north of Beirut.
Hezbollah said it fired “a rocket salvo” at the northern Israeli town of Safed, shortly after announcing attacks on an army base near Haifa city. The Israeli army reported 115 projectiles launched from Lebanon.
Since late September, the war has left at least 1,418 people dead in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called to beef up the mandate of the UN peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon, to give UNIFIL more scope to act amid repeated attacks on their positions.
World leaders again called for an end to the war after Sinwar’s death, which Netanyahu called “the beginning of the end”.
US, German, French and British leaders urged “immediate” action to “bring the hostages home”, end the violence and “ensure humanitarian aid reaches civilians” in Gaza.
In August, Netanyahu said Sinwar was “the only obstacle to a hostage deal”.
Now, “it is unacceptable that they would stay in captivity even one more day,” said Ayala Metzger, daughter-in-law of killed hostage Yoram Metzger.
On Friday, Qatar-based Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya reiterated that the group would not free Israeli hostages “unless the aggression against our people in Gaza stops”.
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