by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Arafat Barbakh
CAIRO/GAZA (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of Palestinians sought shelter on Friday in the central Gaza Strip, after being again driven out of the north of the enclave by Israeli tanks, while planes pounded the south of the territory.
In the south, in Rafah, Reuters journalists saw rescuers trying to free a screaming child from the rubble of a building destroyed by an airstrike, using a sledgehammer and a chisel.
A neighbor, Sanad Abou Tabet, said the two-story house was filled with displaced people. After daybreak, relatives came to pick up the dead wrapped in white shrouds.
Tens of thousands of Gaza residents fled Bureij, Maghazi and Nusseirat, crowded areas in the center of the territory, on orders from Israeli forces whose tanks were advancing from the north and east.
Most of them headed south or west toward the town of Deir al Balah, pitching makeshift tents rigged with plastic sheeting on whatever free land they could find.
“We suffered a lot. We spent the whole night without shelter, in the rain and in the cold, we were with our children and elderly women,” relates Oum Hamdi, who was cooking porridge in a pot above a wood fire, surrounded by children.
Not far away, Abdel Nasser Awadallah, with a graying beard, stood inside a wooden frame that will be wrapped in plastic to form a shelter.
“I buried my children, one 16 years old and another 18 years old. I buried my children at 6 a.m., while their bodies were still warm. I also buried my 2 year old nephew, as well as my wife.”
“Never in my life would I have imagined burying my children,” he added. “I thought they would bury me.”
NO SIGN OF DROP IN ISRAELI ASSAULT
Twelve weeks after the Hamas attack in Israel, which left around 1,200 dead, Israeli forces destroyed most of the Gaza Strip, where the Palestinian Islamist movement also took around 240 hostages, around a hundred of whom were been released since.
Almost all of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents have been driven from their homes, and many are now fleeing for the third or fourth time.
Gaza health authorities say more than 21,500 people have been killed since the start of the offensive, including 187 in the last 24 hours, or around 1% of the enclave’s population. Thousands of bodies are still buried under the ruins, according to authorities.
The United Nations estimates that thousands more are at risk of dying due to severe shortages of food, medicine, clean water and adequate shelter.
Israel says it is doing what it can to protect civilians and accuses Hamas fighters of using them as shields, something the Palestinian group denies.
The United States, Israel’s main supporter, publicly called on the Jewish state this month to reduce the intensity of strikes in the coming weeks and shift to targeted operations against Hamas leaders.
Israel nevertheless continues to launch assaults on the enclave. He issued a rare apology Thursday for killing civilians in a massive Christmas Eve airstrike that Palestinian authorities say left dozens dead and triggered one of the largest exoduses of the war so far. ‘now.
According to residents, Israeli forces have reached Bureij, in the center of the enclave, while intense fighting is still taking place in the east of the territory. Bombing was particularly intense in this sector, as well as in the adjacent areas of Nusseirat and Maghazi.
Footage filmed by a Palestinian Red Crescent volunteer in Maghazi shows dead and injured people being carried from ruined buildings. Palestinian media reported that strikes in Nusseirat killed at least 35 people overnight.
In the south, Israeli forces also shelled Khan Younes in anticipation of a new advance in the main southern city of the territory, of which they conquered entire sections at the beginning of the month.
Israel has promised to destroy Hamas. The Palestinians believe that such a goal is unachievable due to the group’s diffuse structure and its deep roots in a territory it has ruled since 2007.
Efforts by Egyptian and Qatari mediators to negotiate a ceasefire have been unsuccessful since a week-long truce in late November.
Egypt, which last week hosted the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, said Thursday it was awaiting responses from both sides to a proposed peace plan.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo and Arafat Barbakh in Gaza, written by Peter Graff; French version Kate Entringer)
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