AT LEAST 16 Palestinians, including seven aid seekers, were killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza yesterday as the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) continued their genocidal war on the Gaza Strip for the 679th consecutive day.
It was marked by relentless air and artillery bombardments and the killing of starving civilians and displaced persons, all under American political and military support, and amid unprecedented international silence and failure.
The Israeli military carried out dozens of airstrikes and committed further massacres, deepening the suffering of over two million displaced Palestinians facing a worsening famine.
Medics in Gaza hospitals reported multiple casualties on Friday, including several aid seekers, in various areas of the Strip since dawn.
There were loud explosions as Israeli forces detonated booby-trapped robots and demolished homes in central Khan Younis, while Israeli artillery shelled the ‘Abu Share’a’ area in the Al-Sabra neighbourhood, southwest of Gaza City.
Israeli tanks opened heavy fire in northwestern Khan Younis, in southern Gaza.
A Four-year-old child, Ali Hammam Hassan, succumbed to his wounds after an Israeli airstrike hit his home in Deir al-Balah days ago.
Two Palestinians were killed and others injured after an Israeli strike targeted a tent sheltering displaced families near Al-Rimal neighbourhood, west of Gaza City.
The Israeli forces blew up residential buildings while simultaneously firing tank shells in central and northern Khan Younis.
- The Tel Aviv-based +972 Magazine reports that the Israeli military has created a special unit called the Legitimisation Cell with the aim of finding Gaza journalists who could potentially be portrayed as ‘terrorists’ in Hamas and other organisations.
Three unnamed Israeli intelligence sources told the publication that the motivation was public relations, not security, and the unit would work to find any information that could be used against journalists whenever criticism of Israel in the media intensified.
Information gathered by the unit was also passed regularly to US officials through direct channels. In at least one case since the start of the war, the unit misrepresented intelligence in a way that allowed for the false portrayal of a journalist as a member of Hamas’s military wing.
According to +972 Magazine, ‘a similar pattern of manipulation is evident in the intelligence presented’ on Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, who was killed with five other journalists after Israel accused him of being a Hamas operative.
Hamas regrets PA call for disarmament
THE Hamas Movement expressed regret on Thursday evening over statements made by Palestinian Authority (PA) Foreign Minister Farsin Aghabekyan, in which she called for the disarmament of the resistance.
Hamas described her remarks as detrimental to the Palestinian people and their national interests.
In a statement, Hamas affirmed that the resistance and its weapons are a national right necessitated by the very existence of the occupation.
The Movement stressed that the resistance’s weapons can only be relinquished upon the full restoration of the Palestinian people’s rights and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
Hamas voiced astonishment at the issuance of such positions at a time when Israel is waging a brutal genocide in the Gaza Strip and imposing dangerous realities on the ground in the occupied West Bank, and most recently, Smotrich’s plan aimed at isolating Jerusalem, fragmenting the West Bank, confiscating its land, and ultimately displacing its people.
The Movement renewed its call on the PA leadership to retract these statements and to stand alongside the Palestinian people and their national forces in confronting the occupation’s schemes to annihilate and expel them from their homeland.
Hamas stressed that the future of Gaza and Palestine will be determined by the united will of the Palestinian people, not by the occupation or its dictates.
