Al Jazeera reported Tuesday that 89 Palestinians had been killed and 329 wounded throughout the Gaza Strip as Israel launched a new assault on the city of Khan Younis, about seven miles from the enclave’s southern border. Al Jazeera reported that there are another 68 missing under the rubble of the attacks.
Israeli tanks rolled back into Khan Younis on Monday in the third assault on the city and 70 Palestinians were killed. Reuters reported, “The Palestinians were killed by tank salvoes in the town of Bani Suhaila and other towns fringing the eastern side of Khan Younis, with the area also bombarded from the air,” according to Gaza medics.
“It is like doomsday,” one resident told Reuters via chat app. “People are fleeing under fire, many are dead and wounded on the roads,” he said.
The Gaza health ministry reported that the dead included several women and children and that at least 200 others had been wounded. Per the formula of the Zionist state, the massacre at Khan Younis was justified because Israeli intelligence said militants were firing rockets from the area and Hamas was attempting to regroup there.
However, Palestinian authorities said 400,000 people were living in the targeted areas and dozens of families had started leaving their homes but were not given enough time to vacate the zone before the air strikes by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) began.
Reuters reported, “Some families fled on donkey carts, others on foot, carrying mattresses and other belongings.”
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society reported that two of its clinics in eastern Khan Younis had been knocked out of operation by the Israeli onslaught.
At the Nasser Medical Complex, some people stood outside the morgue to bid farewell to their dead relatives. Ahmed Sammour, who lost several relatives in bombings of eastern Khan Younis, told Reuters, “We are tired. We are tired in Gaza. Every day our children are martyred—every day, every moment.”
Sammour went on, “No one told us to evacuate. They brought four floors crashing down on civilians, … and the bodies they could reach, they brought to the refrigerator [morgue].”
One man who arrived at the hospital with an ambulance carrying dead bodies told Al Jazeera, “A family, including children, were all torn to pieces while they were sleeping.”
Events in nearby Deir Al-Balah, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are sheltering, also exposed the lies of the Israeli regime as an airstrike hit a tent used by local journalists inside Al-Aqsa Hospital, killing one of them and wounding two other people, according to the Gaza government media office. This killing raised the number of Palestinian journalists killed in the Israeli genocide to 163.
Al Jazeera also reported that nine people were killed in an Israeli bombing of a house at the entrance to the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. Four children were among the dead and another 10 people were wounded. Video of the aftermath posted by Al Jazeera showed blood splattered on the walls of the house as people evacuated the bodies.
Also on Monday, the Israeli military ordered Palestinians to leave al-Mawasi, a coastal town between Khan Younis and Rafah. In a statement, the IDF urged people to relocate from eastern Khan Younis to the west of the “adjusted humanitarian area of al-Mawasi.” However, Palestinians are reluctant to move into the tent camps in west al-Mawasi after an attack on the “safe zone” 10 days before which killed at least 92 people and wounded more than 300.
There is nowhere safe in Gaza for Palestinians as the bogus “humanitarian zones” designated by Israel have been downsized to 18.5 square miles. This means that a population of 1.7 million people, which has been uprooted through forced evacuations but prevented from leaving Gaza, is now living in just 13 percent of the entire area of the Gaza Strip.
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said the Israeli military has placed more than 80 percent of the Gaza Strip, “under evacuation orders or designated as a no-go zone.” UNRWA posted on X, “We just keep hearing the same question: Where do I go?”
There is now no question that the Israeli government, after systematically destroying the infrastructure, residences, businesses, schools, religious buildings and hospitals of Gaza, is confining the Palestinian population into a tiny fraction of the strip so it can complete the ethnic cleansing of the area.
Gaza health authorities reported the death toll has reached 39,006 as of Monday with 89,818 wounded since October. The scale of the crime, as estimated two weeks ago by the medical journal The Lancet, is many multiples of the official count, with people killed directly or indirectly likely set at 186,000 or more.
The fascist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington D.C. on Monday amid a growing wave of protests demanding an end to the Gaza genocide. Protesters staged a sit-in at a congressional office building and Jewish Voice for Peace took over the Rotunda of the Cannon Building with t-shirts that said, “Not in Our Name,” and chanting “Let Gaza Live!” In both cases, Capitol police moved in and made multiple arrests of demonstrators.
Netanyahu will address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday and then meet separately with President Biden and Kamala Harris on Thursday and Donald Trump on Friday. The appearance of Netanyahu in Washington at the invitation of both the Democrats and Republicans provides further validation of the complicity of the US political establishment in the Gaza genocide.
The rights group Amnesty International said in a statement that the US is “on notice of the government of Israel’s unlawful use of US-origin weapons, including in war crimes, and will be complicit in further violations committed with these weapons.”
The rights group noted that countries that provide arms to governments or armed groups that break international law “are not only violating their obligation to ensure respect for international humanitarian law but are in fact assisting these violations to commit ‘internationally wrongful acts.’” It added that “companies manufacturing and exporting arms also have a responsibility to respect human rights and international humanitarian law throughout their value chains.”
However, for the US political establishment, the ongoing genocide in Gaza by Israel is a key part of a global war strategy aimed at imposing the interests of American imperialism on the world’s population.
Photo: Smoke rises following Israeli bombardments in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Monday, July 22, 2024 © AP Photo / Abdel Kareem Hana.
Source: World Socialist Web Site.
