Israeli forces bombed a house in the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City on Wednesday, killing at least two Palestinians, the Palestinian news agency WAFA has reported, as the IDF continues its attacks and military operations in the Strip despite the US-backed ceasefire deal.
Others were injured in the attack, and footage shows a man on a stretcher and an elderly woman arriving at the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital after the strike. According to sources speaking to the Quds News Network, two young men were killed in the strike.
The Israeli military and the Shin Bet claimed on Wednesday that a Hamas operative opened fire on Israeli forces in northern Gaza and that Israeli forces carried out a strike on a “senior terrorist,” but it’s unclear if the statement was referring to the same incident.
Also on Wednesday, an Israeli-backed gang, which calls itself the Popular Forces, claimed that it killed two Hamas members in southern Gaza.
The Popular Forces were previously led by Yasser Abu Shabab, who was known for looting aid, but he was killed and December and replaced by Ghassan al-Duhaini, who was once a member of Army of Islam, or Jaysh al-Islam (not to be confused with a Syrian group with the same name), a Gaza-based Salafi jihadist group with a similar ideology to al-Qaeda that declared its allegiance to ISIS in 2015.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said in its latest update, which it released on Tuesday, that since the truce deal was supposed to go into effect, Israeli forces in Gaza have killed at least 424 Palestinians and wounded 1,199. During that time, 685 bodies of Palestinians killed in previous Israeli attacks have been recovered from the rubble.
“A number of victims are still under the rubble and in the streets, as ambulance and civil defense crews have been unable to reach them so far,” the ministry wrote on Telegram. When the ceasefire deal was first signed in early October, at least 10,000 Palestinians were reported missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
