Hezbollah attacks military sites in the Golan Heights

CAIRO: Israeli forces continued to bomb central Gaza on Sunday, a day after 274 Palestinians were killed in a hostage rescue operation. Tanks also advanced deeper into Rafah in an apparent attempt to seal off part of the southern city, residents and Hamas media reported.

Palestinians remain in shock over Saturday’s death toll, the highest in a 24-hour period of the Gaza war in months, and many of them are women and children, Palestinian doctors said.

In an update on Sunday, the Gaza Strip’s Health Ministry said 274 Palestinians were killed – up from 210 on Saturday – and 698 injured when Israeli special forces commandos entered the densely populated Al-Nuseirat camp to free four hostages held by Hamas militants since October.

64 of the dead were children and 57 women, the Hamas-run government media office in the Gaza Strip said on Sunday.

The Israeli military said a special forces officer was killed in an exchange of fire with militants who emerged from cover in apartment blocks. It said it knew of “less than 100” Palestinians killed, but did not say how many of them were fighters or civilians.

In central Gaza on Sunday, separate Israeli air strikes on homes in the town of Deir Al-Balah and nearby Al-Bureij killed three Palestinians each, while tanks shelled parts of Al-Nuseirat and Al-Maghazi, medics said.

Al-Maghazi, Al-Nuseirat and Al-Bureij are historic, urbanized refugee camps that are often involved in the current war.

The Israeli military said in a statement that its forces continued operations east of Al-Bureij and Deir Al-Balah, killing numerous Palestinian gunmen and destroying militants’ infrastructure.

Israel sent troops to Rafah in May. The mission is designed to wipe out the last intact Hamas fighting units after eight months of war. In that war, the Israeli forces bombed large parts of the rest of the Gaza Strip to rubble and advanced against the fierce resistance of militants trapped in overcrowded towns and camps.

Since then, Israeli tank troops have taken over the entire Gaza border strip with Egypt, which runs through Rafah to the Mediterranean coast, and have penetrated numerous districts of the city of 280,000 inhabitants. Around a million people who had sought refuge in Rafah have had to flee elsewhere.

ISRAELI TANKS CONTINUE TO ADVANCE IN RAFAH

On Sunday, tanks advanced into two new districts in an apparent effort to complete the encirclement of the entire eastern side of Rafah, clashing with dug-in Hamas-led armed groups, according to residents trapped in their homes.

According to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), by June 5 all refugees had left the country except for about 100,000 who had sought refuge in eastern Rafah after fleeing the Israeli offensive further north in the Gaza Strip.

“All UNRWA shelters in Rafah have been evacuated. Many of the people who were housed in Rafah have fled up the coast and sought safer places in Khan Younis and the central part (of Gaza),” UNRWA said in a statement.

Palestinian medics said two people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a house in Tel Al-Sultan, western Rafah.

The Israeli military said troops from the 162nd Division raided some districts of Rafah, where they discovered “numerous additional terror tunnel shafts, mortars and (other) weapons” belonging to Palestinian Islamist militants.

Hamas sparked the war with a lightning attack on Israel on October 7. According to Israeli sources, around 1,200 people were killed and over 250 taken hostage. About half of the hostages were released during a brief ceasefire in November.

Israel’s subsequent air and ground war in Gaza has left at least 37,084 Palestinians dead, the Hamas-controlled territory’s health ministry said in its Sunday update. The ministry believes thousands more dead are buried under the rubble.

Attempts by the United States and regional countries to negotiate a deal that would release all remaining hostages in exchange for a ceasefire have repeatedly failed due to Israel and Hamas’s unwillingness to compromise on the terms of an end to the war.

As the war dragged on, a humanitarian catastrophe emerged: more than three-quarters of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million inhabitants had to flee their homes, malnutrition is widespread and basic infrastructure lies in ruins.

The Gaza conflict has destabilized the wider Middle East, drawing in particular Iran, Hamas’s main backer, and Hezbollah, Hamas’s Lebanese ally, into the conflict. On Israel’s northern border, Hezbollah and Hezbollah have been engaged in confrontations with Israel for months, fueling fears of a full-scale war.

Concerns about an escalation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah and a sharp decline in expectations of a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip have weakened the Israeli shekel by three percent to 3.75 to the dollar since June 4.