GAZA
— Amidst intensifying conflicts around
Khan Yunis in northern Gaza, images and
videos circulated on
social media depicting Israeli forces escorting a large number
of men, semi-naked and blindfolded, in a military bus to an undisclosed
location.
اضافة اعلان
Eyewitnesses
reported that on Thursday, the Israeli army arrested "hundreds" of
displaced men in a shelter school in Beit Lahia, stripping them of their
clothes and separating them from women and children, Khaberni reported.
The
Israeli Broadcasting Authority announced that the army arrested "tens of
men in the Gaza Strip during its advance to control the northern part of the
sector, some of whom surrendered voluntarily to verify whether some of them are
terrorists of the Hamas movement or activists in it."
In
a statement to the BBC on Friday,
Elon Levy, the spokesperson for the Israeli
government, commented that all the detained men are of military conscription
age and were found in areas that civilians were supposed to evacuate weeks ago.
Levy
added that they would be interrogated "to determine who was indeed a
terrorist from Hamas and who was not."
*Editors note: The spokesperson was
probably referring to Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.
He
stated that the detained men were found in areas where the Israeli forces had
engaged in "close combat" with Hamas. They were "deliberately
disguised as civilians" and worked from within civilian buildings,
according to him.
While
the Israeli army did not directly comment on the photos, its spokesperson,
Daniel Haggai, stated on Thursday that "Israeli army fighters and Shin Bet
officers arrested and interrogated hundreds of suspects in terrorist
activities."
He
added, "Many of them surrendered themselves to our forces in the past 24
hours, and the intelligence obtained from their interrogation is being used to
continue the fight."
Izzat
al-Risheq, a member of the political bureau of the Hamas movement, stated on
Friday, holding the Israeli army responsible for the lives and safety of the
detainees in Beit Lahia in the Gaza Strip on Thursday.
In
his statement, Risheq described the Israeli army's arrest of a group of
displaced civilians in a Gaza school and stripping them of their clothes in a
degrading manner as a "blatant Zionist crime of revenge against the
unarmed civilians of our people, in response to the blows received by its
soldiers and officers at the hands of the men of the Palestinian
resistance."
He
called on all human rights and humanitarian organizations to intervene
immediately "to expose this heinous crime against innocent civilians who
have been displaced in a school turned into a shelter due to the aggression and
massacres," and to press by all means for their release.
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