The Israeli air force continued to pound the Gaza Strip overnight, with over 500 raids in total and the use of 80 fighter-bombers. The number of Palestinian victims has risen to 35, the injured are at least two hundred. The toll on the Israeli side is also weighed down: five dead and a hundred injured. These are the most violent clashes since 2014, when Israel launched its latest land raid on Gaza. The militant groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, reacted with new rocket launches, up to the city of Beersheba and the suburbs of Tel Aviv, seventy kilometers from the border. In Lod, in the hinterland of the largest Israeli metropolis, two people died after a bomb hit their car.
Instead, Israeli fighters have again targeted the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza, where Intelligence has identified the main command centers of Hamas. Yesterday the bombs had brought down a thirteen-story building, at two this morning another building in the same block was half-destroyed. The air force had issued warning messages before striking. Office employees and reporters left the area on time. Israel reiterated that the residential complexes housed “numerous Hamas offices” as well as a “military research center” and “intelligence infrastructure”. For the Gaza Health Ministry, however, there are also “ten children” among the total victims.
Israel is also worried about the home front. The suburb of Lod finds itself in the double grip of rocket launches and protests from the local Arab population. A young man was killed by the security forces in the night between Monday and yesterday and the clashes continued into the night, so much so that in an emergency meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Benny Gantz it was decided to “move battalions of the border police from Judea and Samaria (West Bank, ed) to the city of Lod ”. However, tensions remain high also in Jerusalem and in the West Bank, where another Palestinian victim in the clashes last night. The UN special envoy for the Middle East, Tor Wennesland, asked the two sides to “stop the fire immediately, we are heading towards a full-scale war”.