CAIRO: Israeli forces pounded central Gaza anew on Sunday, a day after killing 274 Palestinians during a prisoner rescue raid, and tanks advanced further into Rafah in an apparent bid to seal off part of the southern city, residents and Hamas media said.

Palestinians remained in shock over Saturday’s death toll, the worst over a 24-hour period of the Gaza war for months and including many women and children, Palestinian medics said.

In an update on Sunday, Gaza’s health ministry said 274 Palestinians were killed — up from 210 it reported on Saturday — and 698 were injured when Israeli special force commandos stormed into the densely populated Al Nuseirat camp. Sixty-four of the dead were children and 57 were women, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said on Sunday.

Israel’s military said a special forces officer was killed in exchanges of fire with militants emerging from cover in residential blocks, and that it knew of “under 100” Palestinians killed, though not how many of them were fighters or civilians.

The invading army also killed three prisoners, including one with US citizenship

Hamas’ armed wing said on Sunday three Israeli hostages, including one with U.S. citizenship, were killed during the raid, but provided no names. It released a video of what appeared to be corpses with censor bars obscuring their faces. A Hamas assertion on Saturday that some prisoners had died was rejected as “a blatant lie” by the Israeli military.

Gaza’s health ministry said another 798 Palestinians were inju­red in the Israeli raid, and one of them, 4-year-old Tawfiq Abu Youssef, was in critical condition when visited in hospital on Sunday by his father Raed.

The boy was first thought to have died before he moved his hand slightly while in the arms of a relative rushing him to hospital — captured in a video that went viral on social media.

“I had already dug his grave,” his father said, adding that most members of his extended family were among those killed in the raid.

More air strikes

In central Gaza on Sunday, Israeli airstrikes on houses in the city of Deir Al-Balah and in the nearby Al-Bureij refugee camp killed three Palestinians in each location, while tanks shelled parts of Al-Nuseirat and Al-Maghazi camps, medics said.

The Israeli military said in a statement its forces were continuing operations east of Al-Bureij and Deir al-Balah.

Israel sent forces into Rafah in May in what it called a mission to wipe out Hamas’ last intact combat units after eight months of aggression, in which Israeli forces have bombed much of the rest of Gaza to rubble while advancing against fierce resistance from militants embedded in crowded cities and built-up camps.

Israeli tank forces have since seized Gaza’s entire border strip with Egypt running through Rafah to the Mediterranean coast and invaded many districts of the city of 280,000 residents, prompting around one million displaced people who had been sheltering in Rafah to flee elsewhere.

Tanks in Rafah

On Sunday, tanks advanced into two new districts in an apparent effort to complete the encirclement of the entire eastern side of Rafah, touching off clashes with dug-in Hamas-led armed groups, according to residents trapped in their homes.

Palestinian medics said an Israeli airstrike on a house in Tel Al-Sultan in western Rafah killed two people. The Israeli military said troops of its 162nd division were raiding some districts of Rafah where they had located “numerous additional terror tunnel shafts, mortars, and (other) weapons” belonging to Palestinian fighters.Attempts by the United States and regional countries to broker a deal that would release all remaining prisoners in return for a ceasefire have repeatedly stumbled on Israeli intransigence.

A humanitarian catastrophe has unfolded as the war has dragged on, with over three-quarters of Gaza’s 2.3 million population displaced, malnutrition widespread and basic infrastructure in ruins.

Gaza’s conflict has destabilised the wider Middle East, drawing in Hamas’ main supporter Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, which has been clashing with Israel along its northern border for months, raising fears of all-out war.

Concern about an escalation in Israeli-Hezbollah hostilities and a sharp decline in expectations of a Gaza ceasefire have weakened Israel’s shekel currency by 3 per cent to 3.75 to the dollar since June 4.

Published in Dawn, June 10th, 2024