The Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that the death toll from the Israeli attacks on the strip had reached 20,424, with 54,036 wounded. It said that 166 people died and 384 were injured in the strip in the last 24 hours.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Observatory stated on Sunday that the Israeli army was still raiding schools that had been used as shelters by tens of thousands of displaced people across the Gaza Strip. It emphasized that Israeli forces were committing grave violations in schools for displaced people, such as killings, arrests, abuse, and intimidation of civilians.
The Observatory said that it recorded Sunday’s assault by Israeli forces on a school in Jabalia, and the detention of 15-year-old boys after forcing them to strip naked and stay in their underwear. It also stressed that the Israeli forces had made shelter centers permissible targets since the beginning of their war in the Gaza Strip, noting that the preliminary information it gathered confirmed that the attacks were unwarranted and aimed at defenseless civilians.
The Government Information Office in Gaza said that it documented live accounts of the field executions of more than 137 civilians in Gaza and North governorates, indicating that the occupying army set up detention camps east of Gaza City, dug large pits in which it put dozens of people alive, and then shot them dead before burying them with bulldozers.
The office explained that these crimes were repeated in Gaza and the north, through the execution of dozens of civilians in front of their families, as well as the execution of pregnant women who were waving white flags on their way to Al Awda Hospital in northern Gaza.
The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) blamed the Israeli occupation for the deterioration of health conditions in the Gaza Strip, and for exposing the displaced people of Gaza to epidemics and infectious diseases, through its systematic targeting of all hospitals in the Strip, destroying all their equipment, and rendering them inoperable.
In a statement, Hamas urged the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to intervene and provide the essential health and medical supplies to protect the people of Gaza from the outbreak of infectious diseases.
The movement added: “This is the least that the international community and the United Nations can do for the genocide war against our people by the Nazi occupying army.”
Hamas also reiterated its call to the International Committee of the Red Cross to act and reveal the fate of hundreds of Palestinians abducted from Gaza and held by the occupying forces in unknown conditions, especially after the release of twenty detainees who showed signs of torture and maltreatment.
It also appealed to human rights organizations to document the testimonies of detainees who were freed, to submit them to the relevant international courts, and to hold the occupying leaders accountable for their “fascist behavior towards our people and innocent civilians.”
In a related development, Reuters cited a member of the Islamic Jihad movement as saying that a delegation from the movement reached Cairo to hold discussions with Egyptian security officials. He said that the talks would concentrate on ending the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Army Radio reported earlier on Sunday that the Israeli government had recently dispatched a senior official to Cairo, as part of its efforts to achieve a prisoner swap deal with Hamas, which demands a halt to the attacks before initiating negotiations on this issue.
On the ground, the Israeli occupying army announced early on Sunday that 8 soldiers and officers died and 6 others were critically wounded during clashes in the Gaza Strip. Among the deceased were 3 soldiers from the “Yahloum” engineering unit, which the Al-Qassam Brigades claimed on Saturday, trapping 5 of its members in an explosive-laden tunnel in Khan Yunis before detonating it on them.
The Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas movement, also said that it hit an Israeli force of 10 soldiers inside a building in Juhr al-Dik with an anti-fortification shell, and confirmed that it left them dead and injured.
The Brigades declared on Sunday that they had targeted an Israeli infantry force in Juhr al-Dik, causing casualties among its ranks, amid ongoing intense battles between the resistance and the occupying forces in the area. It stated that they holed up inside a building in the Juhr al-Dik area in the centre of the Gaza Strip, confirming that the force members were killed or injured after they were hit by an anti-fortification TBG missile.
The movement’s fighters also managed to snipe 3 soldiers in the Israeli occupying army, adding that one of them was a major, in the Al-Qasaib neighborhood in the Jabalia camp in the northern Gaza Strip.
In addition, the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad Movement, said that it targeted an Israeli “Merkava” tank with a Tandom shell on Al-Nuzha Street in Jabalia Al-Balad, north of the Gaza Strip. The Al-Quds Brigades announced that they shelled occupying military gatherings near Al-Zalal Mosque, east of Khan Yunis, with a missile salvo and mortar shells.
