GAZA
— On Saturday, Isreali Occupation Forces clashed with Hamas resistance fighters
across the Gaza Strip, according to the IOF, deepening their engagement in the
decimated enclave even as the Palestinian death toll from relentless airstrikes
in 12 weeks of war soared higher.
اضافة اعلان
The
Gaza Health Ministry reported Saturday that 165 people had been killed in
Israeli airstrikes and artillery attacks in the previous 24 hours, adding to
the ministry’s toll of more than 20,000 people killed in Gaza since
October 7.
IOF
said late Friday that it had destroyed a Gaza City apartment of the person it
considers the mastermind of those attacks, Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, who
is also on the most wanted list in Israel.
IOF
said that Sinwar used the apartment as a hideout and that it destroyed a tunnel
shaft discovered by its troops in the apartment’s basement floor, as well as an
underground headquarters that served as a nerve center for senior officials
from Hamas’ military and
political wings.
He
was not believed to be in the complex when it was hit, having decamped to the
south when the Israeli campaign began.
As
global outrage and impatience grow over the war’s devastating human toll, the
Biden administration said late Friday that it was bypassing Congress for the
second time since the war started for a weapons sale to Israel.
The
State Department approved a proposed $147.5 million sale of artillery munitions
and related equipment to Israel, invoking an emergency provision that avoids a
congressional review process generally required for arms sales to other
nations, the Biden administration said. The department used the same provision
this month to facilitate a government sale of about 13,000 rounds of tank
ammunition to Israel.
The
Pentagon said in a statement that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had
“provided detailed justification to Congress that an emergency exists that
requires the immediate sale” to Israel.
“The
United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to U.S.
national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready
self-defense capability,” the statement said, adding: “It is incumbent on all
countries to employ munitions consistent with international humanitarian law.”
Hamas
said in a statement Saturday that the US provision of ammunition to Israel was
“clear evidence of the American administration’s full sponsorship of this
criminal war.”
Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing increasing pressure from the United
States and many other nations to lower the conflict’s intensity, but he said
last week that Israel would be “deepening” the fighting in the coming days.
At
a televised news conference Saturday, Netanyahu vowed again that Israel would
not stop its campaign until it achieved victory and said that the war would
continue for “many more months.”
Israeli
airstrikes and artillery pounded central and southern Gaza on Saturday,
striking areas where hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians were told by
Israel to congregate for safety from the onslaught across the territory,
according to the Palestinian news media.
Israel
says it has killed thousands of Hamas militants, including several commanders,
but it has failed to locate Sinwar, whose killing or capture would be a
significant blow to Hamas. Israel has offered $400,000 to anyone who can
provide information leading to his arrest.
A
founding member of Hamas in the 1980s, Sinwar spent decades in Israeli prisons
after being arrested in 1988 and convicted of murdering four Palestinians who
were suspected of collaborating with Israel.
Despite
having received a life sentence, he was released in 2011 as one of the 1,026
Palestinians freed from Israeli jails in exchange for the release of an Israeli
occupation soldier, Gilad Shalit, whom Hamas had taken captive years earlier.
Upon Sinwar’s release, he committed himself to obtaining the release of other
Palestinians incarcerated in Israel.
IOF
described the underground headquarters connected to Sinwar’s apartment as part
of a network of tunnels “in which senior officials of the Hamas terrorist
organization moved and operated.”
The
headquarters was described as about 20 yards underground, which Israel said was
deeper than other tunnels. The army said it had ventilation and electricity and
was linked to sewage lines. It led to a tunnel about 250 yards long that the
army said contained rooms for prayers and for resting, and stocked for an
extended hideout.
“The
tunnel was built so that it would be possible to stay inside it and conduct
combat from it for long periods,” the army statement said.
Hamas’
top leaders are believed to be sheltering in deep tunnels under Gaza along with
most of the group’s fighters and the remaining hostages abducted in the Oct. 7
attacks. Although the Israeli army says it has demolished at least 1,500
shafts, experts believe the underground infrastructure to be largely intact.
Israel’s
search-and-destroy missions and its intensive bombardments have come at the
cost of thousands of women, children, and other noncombatants killed.
Video
footage from local journalists in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where large
numbers of displaced people have fled, showed the immediate aftermath of
strikes on residential homes. In chaotic scenes in narrow, crowded streets,
people carried the injured out from the rubble, wrapped in blankets. Other
wounded were ferried by hand, as several men struggled to carry a man’s limp
body.
Israeli
airstrikes also hit parts of central Gaza that were under Israeli evacuation
orders issued this past week. More than 150,000 people are affected by those
orders, according to the United Nations, although it was unclear how many have
fled. The strikes forced some families who have already been uprooted numerous
times into yet more difficult decisions about whether to move again.
A
strike on the home of a journalist in the central Gaza town of Nuseirat killed
him and a number of his family members and injured several others, according to
the Palestinian media.
More
journalists have been killed in the 12 weeks of the war than have ever been
killed in a single country over an entire year, according to the Committee to
Protect Journalists, which calculates that at least 69 journalists and media
workers had been killed since Oct. 7.
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