SCORES of Palestinian civilians were brutally murdered and many others injured yesterday as the Israeli genocide campaign in Gaza entered its 44th day in a row.
WAFA correspondents reported that at least six civilians were killed, and others injured in an Israeli airstrike targeting homes in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood in Gaza City. Israeli bombardment also targeted homes in the Safatawi neighbourhood in northern Gaza and in Khan Younis, south of the Strip, with no confirmed reports of casualties.
Israeli warplanes also carried out a series of airstrikes in the Tel al-Zaatar area and around the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza. Simultaneously, Israeli artillery fired shells around the Zarka area and Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.
Meantime, medical sources in Gaza announced the evacuation of all the 32 premature babies and the last few medical personnel from the Al-Shifa Medical Complex by a WHO delegation, a day after most of the medical staff and patients were forcibly evacuated by the Israeli army.
As well, Israeli prison authorities have imposed a series of additional punitive measures against Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli imprisonment since the beginning of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip on October 7th, the Commission of Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs said yesterday.
The Commission said these punitive measures against the prisoners include: ‘Medical neglect, poor-quality and insufficient food, denial of access to the exercise yard, confiscation of personal items, daily power cuts, overcrowded cells, detainees are subjected to frequent assaults in their cells, repeated raids by inspection units, marked by brutal and savage suppression.’
The US-backed Israeli gangster regime is proceeding with its plans to smash the Palestinian people and impose a Zionist dictatorship over the oil-rich region. These measures are taking place after the Hamas movement stormed over the border into Israel launching Operation Al-Aqsa Storm into the occupied territories.
The Israeli security establishment’s assessment is that Hamas intended to infiltrate Re’im and other villages in the occupied territories and that it found out about the festival through drones or parachutes, and directed fighters to the location using their communications system upon a spontaneous decision to target the party, Haaretz reported on Saturday.
However, an Israeli army combat helicopter that arrived at the scene and fired at Palestinian fighters apparently also hit some party-goers, according to the assessment, which is based on interrogations from Hamas members and the Israeli police’s investigation of the incident, among other things.
One of the findings reinforcing the assessment, is that the first resistance fighters arrived at the festival’s location from Route 232, and not from the direction of the Gaza border, as Israeli police and other senior security figures said.
‘The event was attended, according to our estimate, by some 4,400 people, the large majority of whom managed to flee following the decision to disperse the event made four minutes after the rocket attack,’ a senior police official said.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian health minister has said that the real genocide is the savage war that Israel is carrying out against the Gaza Strip, gutting its hospitals and schools.
In fact, Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Storm on October 7 in response to Israel’s violations at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East al-Quds and growing settler violence against Palestinians. The raid shook the occupying entity’s invincibility myth, leaving 1,200 Israelis dead, including 360 participants at the music festival.
In response, Tel Aviv launched a genocidal war on the besieged Gaza Strip that has so far killed at least 12,300 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured around 30,000 others.
The regime has also imposed a ‘complete siege’ on the coastal sliver, cutting off fuel, electricity, food, and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.
Millions of workers and youth have now taken to the streets worldwide in support of the Palestinians. They have shown the way to the trade unions who must now call general strikes to stop all arms supplies to Israel and bring down the capitalist governments that are propping Israel up!