The Ministry of Health in Gaza announced on Tuesday that the death toll from the ongoing Israeli aggression on the strip had reached 19,667 and the number of injured had risen to 52,586.
The Ministry’s spokesperson Ashraf Al-Qudra said: “In the past hours, the Israeli occupation forces committed 17 horrific massacres in all areas of the Gaza Strip.” He added: “214 martyrs and 300 injured were brought to hospitals in the past hours, and many victims are still under the rubble and on the roads.”
The ministry also expressed its astonishment at the international silence over the massacres committed by Israeli forces in northern Gaza, and the occupation’s persistence in the genocide of the population.
It confirmed that the Israeli massacres in northern Gaza occurred in the absence of health services due to the destruction of hospitals and their closure, which means the inability to provide care for the injured. It also pointed out that the Israeli occupation forces turned Al Awda Hospital into a military base and detained 240 people inside without water, food, or medicine.
Meanwhile, the government media in Gaza also reported that the number of journalists killed had increased to 97, after journalist Adel Zorob was killed in a bombing in Rafah, south of the Strip.
Moreover, Fadel Naeem, head of the orthopaedic department at Al-Ahli Al-Maamdani Hospital – one of the few hospital institutions still in service in the northern Gaza Strip – said that the hospital stopped working on Tuesday after the Israeli army raided it. The occupation army surrounded the hospital and arrested several doctors, nurses, and the wounded, according to Naeem.
Naeem added that the hospital was out of service due to the occupation forces raiding it, and it was impossible to receive patients or injured people, despite reports of dozens of wounded in the streets due to the ongoing Israeli aggression.
In the meantime, the Greek Foreign Minister, Giorgos Gerapetritis, said that negotiations to establish a sea corridor to transport essential goods to the Gaza region and Israel are progressing towards reaching an agreement soon.
“We expect developments on this issue in the coming days.” He added that Greece, which is in talks with France, Cyprus and other countries, will “provide humanitarian aid mainly through its commercial fleet,” Gerapetritis said in media statements.
He explained that if necessary, his country is ready to send aid through military means, as it did last November when it sent a C-130 plane loaded with pharmaceutical and medical supplies to Gaza via Egypt.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said that it is unreasonable for the world to allow what is happening in Gaza to continue, stressing that the continuation of the Israeli war on the Strip is unconscionable and unbelievable, as he put it. WHO pointed out that the number of healthcare workers in Gaza has decreased sharply, adding that at least 200 doctors have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war.
On the other hand, the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas, said that it renewed its bombardment of Tel Aviv with a missile salvo in response to the Israeli massacres against civilians in the Gaza Strip. The Al-Qassam Brigades said that its fighters clashed with an Israeli force of 12 soldiers, and targeted another who came to rescue them, leaving them dead and wounded in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, north of Gaza City.
In the meantime, sirens sounded in Greater Tel Aviv and the city of Rishon LeZion, the Israeli army stated that millions of Israelis were searching for shelter after the missile attack that was launched from the Gaza Strip.
Nevertheless, the Al-Quds Brigades, the military arm of the Islamic Jihad movement, announced that 7 Israeli soldiers were killed or wounded after clashes it described as fierce in the Shujaiya neighbourhood, east of Gaza. The Al-Quds Brigades announced that they had bombed Israeli army crowds east of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, with missiles and mortars, and confirmed that they had caused direct casualties among their ranks and that occupation helicopters were transporting the injured.
In the same context, the Israeli army confirmed that 29 soldiers were injured in the Gaza battles during the past 24 hours, amid clashes between occupation soldiers and Palestinian resistance factions in various areas of the Gaza Strip.
In addition, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that more than 2,800 Israeli soldiers have been receiving treatment in the Rehabilitation Department of the Ministry of Defense since the beginning of the war on Gaza. The head of the rehabilitation department in the Israeli Ministry of Defence said that 18% of the injured Israeli soldiers suffer from psychological symptoms.
