Gaza bombed as fallout brings surging tensions to Lebanon & Yemen, martyrs’ toll at 37,296
GAZA, Palestine (AFP) - Terrorist Israel bombed and shelled Gaza on Saturday, witnesses and first responders said, with fallout from the war bringing a resurgence of tensions to the Lebanon border and Yemen.
The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said that at least 37,296 people have been martyred in the territory during more than eight months of war. The toll includes at least 30 deaths in the past 24 hours, a ministry statement said, adding a total of 85,197 people had been wounded in the Gaza Strip since the war began when Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7.
In the ninth month of war between Palestinian Hamas militants and Israeli forces, the Civil Defence agency in Gaza City, in the territory's north, reported 10 bodies recovered from Israeli strikes on three separate homes. In Rafah, in Gaza's far south near Egypt, witnesses reported clashes between militants and Israeli troops in the city's west, and artillery fire towards a refugee camp in the city centre. AFPTV images showed streets largely deserted.
The United Nations says about one million people have been displaced from Rafah since early May, when Israel began ground operations in pursuit of Hamas militants. Israel's military has also been operating in central Gaza, where on Friday at a hospital in Deir al-Balah city a middle-aged man wept over the body of a younger man. Blood soaked through a white cloth around his neck.
Fears of a broader Middle East conflict have surged again, with Lebanon-based Hezbollah fighters, who are backed by Iran and allied with Hamas, launching waves of rockets and drones against Israeli military targets. Hezbollah said intense strikes since Wednesday were retaliation for Israel's killing of one of its commanders.
Israeli forces responded with shelling, the military said, also announcing air strikes on Hezbollah infrastructure across the border. Two women were killed in a strike on Jannata in southern Lebanon, village official Hassan Shur said, the latest deaths in near-daily exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and the Israeli military since the Gaza war began. On Friday plumes of smoke still billowed over the village.
Ceasefire plan
President Emmanuel Macron said this week that his country and the United States would work separately with Israeli and Lebanese authorities to ease tensions. Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant rejected the initiative, decrying "hostile policies against Israel" by France, which last month had barred Israeli firms from an arms trade show. The Israeli prime minister's office and senior foreign ministry officials distanced themselves from Gallant's comments.
During a Middle East trip this week to push a Gaza truce plan, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said "the best way" to help resolve the Hezbollah-Israel violence was "a resolution of the conflict in Gaza and getting a ceasefire".
'Close to impossible'
Food Programme deputy executive director Carl Skau said that "with lawlessness inside the Strip... and active conflict", it has become "close to impossible to deliver the level of aid that meets the growing demands on the ground".
"More than anything, people want this war to end," he said after a two-day visit to Gaza. The fallout from the Gaza war also escalated this week off Yemen. On Friday the US military said it destroyed two uncrewed surface vessels in the Red Sea belonging to Yemen's Iran-backed Huthi rebels, as well as one drone and seven radars that allowed the rebels to target ships.
The latest reprisal strikes by American or British forces came as the rebels increase attacks against maritime traffic in waters vital to world trade. Earlier Friday a maritime security agency said the crew of the MV Tutor abandoned it, leaving it drifting in the Red Sea, after a sea drone strike. The rebels say they are acting in solidarity with the Palestinians.
