Eight Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza

Occupied Palestinian Territories- AFP

Eight Israeli soldiers were killed in a blast in southern Gaza Saturday, the military said, in one of its heaviest losses of the war, as witnesses reported street battles between occupying troops and the Palestinian resistance.

The military said the IDF soldiers were killed when the Namer armoured vehicle they were travelling in exploded near Gaza’s far-southern city of Rafah, where troops are engaged in fierce fighting in the streets overcrowded with vulnerable civilians.

“There was a very serious damage to the vehicle and those in it, and a large explosion making it difficult to identify and locate the bodies,” it said.

Military spokesman Daniel Hagari told a televised briefing that the blast was “apparently from an explosive device planted in the area or from the firing of an anti-tank missile”.

Saturday’s losses were among the heaviest for the military since it began its ground offensive in Gaza on October 27 and took its overall toll since then to 306 deaths.

In the single largest loss of life for the army, 21 soldiers were killed on January 22 when rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) fire hit a tank near two buildings they were preparing to blow up.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who presides over the ongoing genocide, paid tribute to the soldiers who had lost their lives in combat against the Palestinian resistance. “Our hearts are shattered before this terrible loss,” he said in a statement.

“Despite the heavy and unsettling price, we must cling to the goals of the war.”

At the weekly protest in Tel Aviv against his government’s handling of the war, protester Graciela Barchilon, 68, said she felt “a lot of anger and disappointment”.

“I believe this government is not working and we have to go to elections now,” she said.

The United Nations says about one million people have fled Rafah since early May, when Israel began ground operations in the city that hosts thousands of hapless displaced people.

In Gaza City, in the north of the territory, the civil defence agency reported recovering 10 bodies of Palestinian civilians from three separate homes hit by indiscriminate Israeli strikes.