Gaza’s Health Ministry said Wednesday that Israeli attacks killed at least 47 Palestinians and wounded another 182 over the previous 24-hour period as Israeli strikes continued to pound targets across the Strip.
Strikes were reported across the Gaza Strip, including an attack on a house in Jabalia in the north that killed at least 10, including children. Another Israeli strike targeted the so-called safe zone in al-Mawasi in the south, killing at least eight Palestinians.
An Israeli attack hit a tent camp in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah, but the number of casualties is unclear. In the south, an Israeli strike hit a house in Khan Younis, killing eight, and an attack in Rafah killed at least one Palestinian.
Israeli forces in north Gaza continued to carry out an ethnic cleansing campaign, which is focused on the cities of Jabalia, Beit Lahia, and Beit Hanoun. An Israeli strike near the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia reportedly killed five Palestinians.
According to Reuters, Israeli forces in Beit Hanoun deepened their incursion and forced more Palestinian civilians to flee the area through an Israeli checkpoint. Residents said men were held and questioned while women and children were forced to travel to Gaza City.
“The scenes of the 1948 catastrophe are being repeated. Israel is repeating its massacres, displacement, and destruction,” a resident of Beit Lahia who arrived in Gaza City on Wednesday told Reuters. “North Gaza is being turned into a large buffer zone, Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing under the sight and hearing of the impotent world.”
The Israeli ethnic cleansing campaign has involved a starvation blockade on the cities it’s currently focusing on cleansing. The US continues to provide military despite warning in a letter last month that there may be implications for US support if the aid situation doesn’t improve. The US gave Israel a 30-day deadline, which ended on Tuesday. In that time, the humanitarian situation has only gotten worse, but the State Department said Tuesday there would be no consequences.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said the latest violence has brought its death toll since October 2023 to 43,712 killed and 103,258 wounded. The ministry’s numbers are considered an undercount since they don’t account for Palestinians who are missing and presumed dead under the rubble or indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege.
A group of American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza estimated in an open letter to President Biden in October that the US-backed Israeli bombing campaign and siege have killed at least 118,908 Palestinians, including over 60,000 who have starved to death. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who led the letter, told Antiwar.com in a recent interview that the estimate was the bare minimum they came up with by looking at the available data.
