Palestinian Red Crescent says three children killed in Rafah attack
Add salad method:
Israel launched new airstrikes on Friday against the southernmost city of Rafah in Gaza after U.S. President Joe Biden said Israel’s response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack was “excessive.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered Israeli troops to “prepare operations” in Rafah, the last major city in the Gaza Strip that Israeli ground forces have yet to attack.
The United States is Israel’s main international ally, providing it with billions of dollars in military aid.
The U.S. State Department said on Thursday it did not support a ground offensive against Rafah, warning that such an operation in the city that shelters more than one million displaced Palestinians would risk a “catastrophe” if not well planned.
In a rare rebuke from an ally, Biden said Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7 attack was excessive and should be stopped.
“As you know, I think the response in Gaza has gone too far,” he told reporters at the White House.
“There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are suffering and dying, and this has to stop.”
Witnesses said the city of Rafah, now home to half of the Gaza Strip’s 2.4 million people, came under fresh attacks overnight after Israeli forces stepped up airstrikes on the city.
“Death in our home”
The health ministry in Hamas-controlled areas said the night bombings killed more than 100 people, including at least eight in Rafah.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said three children were killed in the attack on Rafah.
Jaber al-Bardini, 60, of Rafah, said: “We heard a huge explosion next to the house… We found two children martyred in the street.”
“There is no safe place in Rafah. If they attack Rafah, we will die at home. We have no choice. We don’t want to go anywhere else.”
The Israeli army said on Friday that its forces “neutralized 15 terrorists” over the past day in Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza, not far from Rafah. It also reported on fighting in central and northern Gaza.
Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, killing about 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to AFP statistics based on official Israeli data.
In response, Israel vowed to root out Hamas and launched airstrikes and ground offensives that killed at least 27,947 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in Hamas-controlled areas.
Israel says it holds 250 hostages, 132 of whom are still in Gaza, but 29 are presumed dead.
‘Humanitarian nightmare’
U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Vidant Patel said Washington had “not seen any evidence that Israel is seriously planning” a ground operation in Rafah.
He pointed out that the city on the border with Egypt is also an important entry point for humanitarian aid, adding that such attacks “we will not support”.
“To carry out such an operation immediately without planning and thought … would be a disaster,” Patel said.
He added that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on his fifth Middle East crisis trip since the war began, expressed Washington’s concerns directly to Netanyahu during talks in Jerusalem this week.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said news of Israel’s impending advance on Rafah was “shocking” and warned it would “multiply a situation that is already a humanitarian nightmare”.
Meanwhile, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk accused Israel of committing “war crimes” after it reportedly destroyed buildings to create a “buffer zone” along the border within Gaza.
He said that Israel’s “large-scale destruction of property was carried out illegally and wantonly without military necessity, seriously violating the Fourth Geneva Convention and constituting a war crime.”
ceasefire talks
Amid ceasefire talks, Blinken insisted he still saw “room for a deal” to stop the fighting and bring the Israeli hostages away, even after Netanyahu rejected what he called Hamas’s “bizarre demands.” go home.
Egypt will hold new talks with Qatari and Hamas negotiators in the hope of achieving “calm” in Gaza and a prisoner and hostage exchange, an Egyptian official said.
A Palestinian official in Gaza close to the group later told AFP they expected talks to be “difficult” but said Hamas was “eager to reach a ceasefire”.
The war’s repercussions are widespread, with violence involving Iran-backed allies of Hamas surging across the Middle East since October and attracting U.S. troops, among others.
Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement said on Friday it had fired “dozens of Katyusha rockets” into northern Israel shortly before midnight (2100 GMT Thursday) in response to Israeli attacks on targets including Naba Attacks in southern Lebanon, including the city of Tiye.
An Israeli drone struck a car in Nabatiyeh on Thursday, seriously injuring a Hezbollah commander, sources on both sides of the border said.
On the same day, the U.S. military attacked four unmanned surface vessels and seven mobile anti-ship cruise missiles, saying Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels were preparing to launch the missiles at ships in the Red Sea.
The attack follows a wave of attacks by U.S. forces on Iran-linked targets in Iraq and Syria after the killing of three U.S. troops in neighboring Jordan last week.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
