ISRAELI airstrikes continued on Gaza throughout Saturday night and into Sunday morning, with the death toll rising to 271, with 900 injured – 120 seriously so.
Israel began attacks on Gaza at 11.30am Saturday, ostensibly to root out Palestinian military groups launching rockets at Israeli targets. Two massive waves of strikes kicked off the operation, known as Operation Cast Lead, and strikes have continued throughout the night and early morning.
The death toll rises with each strike, as more and more bodies are pulled out of Saturday’s rubble. A timeline of the latest attacks is:
8.00 The last Israeli raid targeted two de facto government police headquarters in the evacuated Israeli settlement Kfar Darum and Al-Matahin (the mills).
7.30 Al-Qarara greenhouses were obliterated in a strike on the southern Strip.
7.15 Bombs hit the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood of Gaza City and another on a military base called ‘Sa’d Sayil’in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Dozens were injured.
6:45 Israeli bombs landed on Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighbourhood where a police centre was destroyed and several injured.
6:30 The attack was preceded by a strike on a medical storehouse in the Al-Junayna neighbourhood and a fuel storehouse with diesel and benzene in the Tal As-Sultan area, both in Rafah in the southern Strip.
The strikes destroyed the buildings and much needed civilian supplies, and killed three who have not yet been identified.
1.01am. After midnight on Saturday, Israeli fighter jets bombarded the security room in front of the Ash-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City as well as a mosque in the compound killing two and injuring seven.
The blast shattered most of the windows of the emergency ward.
The hospital’s morgues were declared full on Saturday and bodies line the hallways waiting to be claimed by family.
12.01am. Three Palestinian activists with Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades were killed when an Israeli strike hit the Al-Mansura area east of Gaza City around midnight.
11.50. Israeli forces launched airstrikes on Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip and several targets in the north.
11.30. Three from Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades were killed when Israeli airstrikes hit the Al-Mansura neighbourhood east of Gaza City.
10.15. Two airstrikes killed three and injured four when they hit the Zaitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City and on Jabalia in the north.
The Director of Ambulance and Emergency Services in the de facto Palestinian Ministry of Health, Muawiya Hassanein, explained that despite media reports to the contrary, a large number of the casualties are civilians including women and children.
Saturday’s attacks
Two massive waves of airstrikes dropped 100 bombs on Gaza at 11.30 and a second at approximately 2.00pm. Smaller strikes hit northern Gaza at 5.30 and 8.00pm.
Israeli strikes targeted de facto government buildings; one Hamas source said ‘every de facto security building was targeted’.
Confirmed casualties include the Commander of the de facto Government Police, Tawfiq Jabir; Governor of the Al-Wusta (central) Districts Ahmad Abu Aashur; and Commander of Security and Protection Services in the de facto government police, Ismail Al-Ja’bari.
Islam Shahwan, a Hamas police spokesman, said that the attacks destroyed most of the police headquarters in the Gaza Strip and that a police graduation ceremony was being held during the assault.
On Saturday afternoon Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak declared the 20 square kilometers of Gaza a ‘special military zone.’ The classification is one degree below a declaration of total war against an enemy state.
In Gaza, Palestinian military wings launched homemade projectiles and shells at Israeli targets, killing one man in the western Negev on Saturday afternoon.
The launches continued throughout the evening, though no other Israeli damages or casualties were reported.
In the West Bank and East Jerusalem demonstrations broke out against the Israeli violence, and clashes erupted in the streets of Jerusalem’s neighbourhoods and in Hebron, where Israeli troops are present.
Eyewitnesses report: ‘Gaza City hospital – a gruesome scene; shocked families pick through body parts to identify loved ones
‘Death shrouds the hallways of Gaza City’s Ash-Shifa medical compound Saturday, its smell creeping in from all corners.
‘Amputated bodies are strewn throughout hallways because morgues in the city can no longer accommodate the dead
‘In one corner a man stands with his seven year old son in a cardboard box because the hospital ran out of sheets to cover the dead with. This is how he will carry him home and bury him.
‘Another man stands dazed, in shock after watching his son Mohammed killed during his graduation ceremony at the de facto police headquarters. The father of one of Mohammed’s classmates stood next to his son as he was decapitated. The man is still screaming.
‘In the packed hospital waiting room a mother sits silently staring into the distance; her son was pronounced dead shortly after she brought him in.
‘Despite the ugly scene at the medical compound people poured in, seeming not to notice the horror of blood and body parts as they hurriedly try to pick out clothing or personal items of loved ones hit by Israeli missiles somewhere in the Gaza Strip.
‘Twelve year old Ayman is screaming at his father who tries to prevent him from seeing the bodies of his uncle and brother, torn to pieces under sheets. “I’m not afraid to see them” he screamed. In a rage as his father holds tight, Ayman catches the hand of a resistance fighter; “shell and kill them as they did to us” he says.
‘Yaha Muheisen stops searching for his son’s body for a moment to speak to reporters: “whatever Israel did it will not defeat us” he says, “it will not weaken our power.”
‘Forty-year-old mother Nawal Al-Lad’a did not find the bodies of her two sons in the medical compound, so she left to look amid the rubble.
‘Husam Farajallah, a university student, was at the hospital collecting the body of his relative. He called what happened in Gaza a “black day” in the lives of all Palestinians, and wondered how the world could watch and do nothing.’
Medics in Gaza have confirmed that the majority of those killed in the day’s attacks were civilians, including men, women and children. Most were cut to pieces, making the job of doctors and medics difficult, and the task of giving bodies back to families painful and gruesome.
The medics working in the field continue to dig up bodies from the densely populated urban areas of Gaza City.
The scenes remind many Palestinians of the images that came out of the Sabra and Shatila massacres from Beirut in 1982, when thousands of Palestinians were killed by the Lebanese Phalangist militia.
As the death toll climbs and no word on a halt to the attacks has come from Israel, Gazans fear for their lives and loved ones.
Meanwhile, ‘the operation in Gaza was necessary and will be expanded as needed’ said Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak during a five o’clock Saturday press conference.
The first two waves of Israeli airstrikes across the coastal region killed upwards of 270 Palestinians and injured almost 900.
The Israeli military has dubbed the action Operation Cast Lead, and Israel has openly declared Gaza a ‘special military zone.’