Israeli forces pummel Gaza cities ahead of rare UN vote

Palestinian Territories — AFP

Israeli forces continued pounding Gaza’s ruined cities Friday even as UN Security Council was about to discuss a resolution calling for cease-fire.

Weeks of Israeli air and ground attacks have left 17,177 people dead in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the latest toll from the Palestine Health Ministry.

Israel has relentlessly bombarded Gaza and sent in tanks and ground troops since the war began on October 7.

Vast areas of Gaza have been reduced to a wasteland. The UN says about 80 percent of the population has been displaced, facing severe shortages of food, fuel, water and medicine, along with the threat of disease.

On Friday, the health ministry reported another 40 dead in strikes near Gaza City, and dozens more in Jabalia and Khan Yunis.

AFPTV live footage showed plumes of dark smoke over the territory’s north.

The death toll also rose in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces shot dead six Palestinians on Friday, the territory’s health ministry said.

– Blood stains –

In Iraq, the US embassy has been attacked for its all-out support to Israel in its genocidal spree in besieged and battered Gaza.

In Gaza, fighting raged around cities in the centre and south, including Deir al-Balah, where ambulances carried numerous wounded.

“May God punish those who can see our suffering and remain calm,” said one Palestinian girl Rimah Mansi, who told the media that “all those we love” were gone.

Further south, in Al-Katiba district of Khan Yunis, residents emerged to scenes of desolation after Israeli strikes. On Thursday the wounded arrived at the city’s Nasser hospital, where blood stained the walls.

The fighting has pushed Gazans further and further south, turning Rafah near the Egyptian border into a vast camp for many of the 1.9 million displaced.

Israel’s military released footage of naval forces firing from the Mediterranean towards what it called “Hamas infrastructure” on shore. Other military videos showed what it described as strikes on so-called “targets” in Khan Yunis.

In a statement Friday, the military said it had killed “numerous” militants in Khan Yunis, part of “extensive battles” in Gaza, where around 450 “targets” were struck Thursday.

“The troops continue to operate to locate and destroy underground tunnel shafts, weapons, and additional ‘terror’ infrastructure,” it said.

Hamas has said it is battling Israeli troops “on all axes of the incursion into the Gaza Strip”.

In the process, thousands of civilians have lost lives, families, homes in one of the most devastating military operations in recent times.

– Rare move –

During a phone call Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, United States President Joe Biden — whose country provides billions of dollars in military aid to Israel — “emphasized the critical need to protect civilians and to separate the civilian population from Hamas”, the White House said.

Biden also called for “corridors that allow people to move safely from defined areas of hostilities”.

Israeli television stations aired footage Thursday of blindfolded men wearing only underwear, guarded by Israeli soldiers in Gaza. Concerns by rights groups have been raised over the dehumanizing treatment of those captured, which Israel says it is “investigating.”

The UN Security Council was meeting after Secretary-General Antonio Guterres invoked the UN Charter’s Article 99, which no one in his post had done for decades.

The article allows the secretary-general to bring to the council’s attention “any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security”.

Guterres appealed for a “humanitarian ceasefire” to prevent “a catastrophe with potentially irreversible implications for Palestinians” and the entire Middle East.

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen responded that Guterres’ tenure was “a danger to world peace” after he invoked Article 99.

The Gaza war has killed 91 Israeli soldiers so far.