Palestinians try to recover a body from the rubble of a house destroyed in an overnight Israeli strike, in Gaza City. Photo / Omar Al-Qatta, AFP
Israel says it has struck an arms dump in Gaza, hours after the deadliest night of bombing since the start of a US-brokered truce, warning it would continue to operate to take out perceived threats.
The military announced it had carried out a precision strike on a site in the Beit Lahia area of northern Gaza where it said weapons were being stockpiled for “an imminent terror attack”.
Israeli troops, it said, would remain deployed in “accordance with the ceasefire agreement and will continue to operate to remove any immediate threat”.
Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital said two Palestinians were killed in the latest strike. The Hamas-run territory’s civil defence agency reported that 104 people – including 46 children and 24 women – died in the previous night’s bombardment.
The Israeli military launched a wave of bombing after one of its soldiers was killed in Gaza on Tuesday (local time). By mid-morning on Wednesday it said it had begun “renewed enforcement of the ceasefire”.
Both US President Donald Trump and regional mediator Qatar said they expected the ceasefire to hold, but inside Gaza displaced families were losing hope.
“We had just started to breathe again, trying to rebuild our lives, when the bombardment came back,” said 31-year-old Khadija al-Husni, a displaced mother living with her children under canvas at a school in Al-Shati refugee camp.
“It’s a crime. Either there is a truce or a war – it can’t be both. The children couldn’t sleep; they thought the war was over.”
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres strongly condemned “the killings due to Israeli airstrikes of civilians in Gaza yesterday, including many children”, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said on Wednesday.
UN rights chief Volker Turk said the report of so many dead was appalling and urged all sides not to let peace “slip from our grasp”, echoing calls from Britain, Germany and the European Union for the parties to recommit to the ceasefire.
In the central city of Deir el-Balah, in a tent near Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, 40-year-old Jalal Abbas was close to despair and accused the Israelis of using false pretexts to resume their campaign.
“The problem is that Trump gives them cover to kill civilians because they mislead him with false information,” he told AFP.
“We want an end to the war and the escalation. We’re exhausted and on the verge of collapse.”
The Israeli military said that its strikes had targeted 30 senior militants, with Defence Minister Israel Katz maintaining “dozens of Hamas commanders were neutralised”.
Israel said it launched the wave of strikes after reservist Master Sergeant Yona Efraim Feldbaum, 37, was killed in Rafah when his engineering vehicle was hit by enemy fire.
“A few minutes later, several anti-tank missiles were fired at another armoured vehicle belonging to the troops in the area,” a military official said.
Hamas said its fighters had “no connection to the shooting incident in Rafah” and reaffirmed its commitment to the US-backed ceasefire.
It also delayed handing over what it said was the remains of a deceased hostage, because the “escalation will hinder the search, excavation and recovery of the bodies”.
Militants took 251 people hostage during Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the war. After the start of this month’s ceasefire it returned the 20 surviving captives still in its custody and began the process of returning 28 bodies of deceased hostages.
But a row over the process of returning the last remains has threatened to derail the ceasefire plan – agreed between Israel and Hamas and backed by Trump’s US administration and regional mediators Egypt, Turkey and Qatar.
Israel accuses Hamas of reneging on the deal by not returning them fast enough, but the Palestinian group says it will take time to locate remains buried in Gaza’s ruins.
Hamas came under mounting pressure on Monday after it returned the partial remains of a previously recovered captive, which Israel said was a breach of the truce.
Hamas had said the remains were the 16th of 28 hostage bodies it had agreed to return under the ceasefire deal, which came into effect on October 10.
But Israeli forensic examination determined Hamas had in fact handed over partial remains of a hostage whose body had already been brought back to Israel around two years ago, according to Netanyahu’s office.
Israeli government spokeswoman Shosh Bedrosian accused Hamas of staging the discovery of the remains.
“Hamas dug a hole in the ground yesterday, placed the partial remains... inside of it, covered it back up with dirt, and handed it over to the Red Cross,” she told journalists.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, responding to a video in circulation that appeared to show the deception, called it “unacceptable that a fake recovery was staged”.
Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem has rejected claims the group knows where the remaining bodies are, arguing that Israel’s bombardment has left locations unrecognisable.
Hamas’ October 2023 attack resulted in the deaths of 1221 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza has killed at least 68,643 people, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the UN considers reliable.
- Agence France-Presse