The death toll from the Israeli aggression in Gaza has risen to 19,667, while the number of injured has reached 52,586, according to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip.
Mohamed Salah, the director of the Red Crescent Society in northern Gaza, said on Wednesday that the ambulance service had been halted due to the siege of occupation vehicles from all sides and that the northern Gaza Strip was suffering from a severe shortage of medical equipment.
The Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip urged human rights organizations to launch an urgent investigation into the massacre committed by occupation soldiers at Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip.
The ministry said that the Israeli army had forced the hospital director, Ahmed Al-Kahlot, to give a statement that matched its account under intimidation and torture. It confirmed that the children in Kamal Adwan Hospital had been trapped without water, food, or electricity for several days before the hospital was bombed.
Moreover, the Palestinian Red Crescent said that the Israeli occupation forces had surrounded its ambulance centre in Jabalia, with 127 people inside, including paramedics and displaced people.
Also on Wednesday, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that children in the Gaza Strip did not receive 90% of their natural water needs. The organization noted that the risk of waterborne diseases in the Strip was “particularly increasing due to the lack of safe drinking water.”
Meanwhile, the head of the political bureau of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), Ismail Haniyeh, arrived in the Egyptian capital on Wednesday, leading a delegation of the movement’s leaders, to discuss a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and the exchange of prisoners with Israel.
Additionally, the Secretary-General of the Islamic Jihad Movement, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, said that a delegation from the movement led by the Secretary-General would head to the Egyptian capital, Cairo, in the coming days, noting that the delegation would discuss during the visit – which came based on an official Egyptian invitation – “ways to stop the aggression and an exchange deal.”
Al-Nakhalah added, “We will go to Cairo with a clear vision, which is to stop the aggression, the withdrawal of enemy forces from the Gaza Strip, and reconstruction,” stressing that the prisoner exchange would take place through the principle of “all for all” in a political process agreed upon by the Palestinian forces, led by the Hamas movement.
The Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, said that its fighters had blown up the entrance of a tunnel east of Khan Yunis as soon as an occupation force approached it, killing and injuring its members.
Also, the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad Movement, said that it had targeted two Israeli military vehicles with “Tandem” shells in the Al-Mughraqa area in the central Gaza Strip.
In the meantime, the Israeli army admitted that 29 soldiers had been wounded in the battles in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, after announcing the death of two officers in the south of the Gaza Strip.
