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CAIRO/GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The Israeli army continued to intensively bombard the center of the Gaza Strip on Tuesday after the prime minister reiterated his determination to destroy Hamas at all costs, a goal that still seems distant but which has already cost the lives of more than 20,000 Palestinians.
Ignoring all calls for a truce, Israel has for 11 weeks pursued a purely military strategy whose risks of overflows appear to increase as attacks from movements aligned with Iran and American responses multiply from Yemen to Iraq.
The war in Gaza is also costly in lives for the Israeli army, which admitted on Tuesday to having lost 160 soldiers since the start of its ground intervention on October 20.
At Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, the largest medical facility in the southern Gaza Strip, doctors said Tuesday that 10 Palestinians had been killed in two separate Israeli airstrikes.
On Monday evening, an aerial bombardment targeting a building in Khan Younes caused numerous civilian casualties, including children, residents said. The Israeli army said it targeted Hamas fighters and tunnel shafts.
Visiting soldiers deployed in northern Gaza a few hours earlier, Benjamin Netanyahu warned that the war was far from over and rejected all “speculation” from the media about a possible truce.
The United States has been pressuring Israel for weeks to make its army work to limit civilian casualties and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid, but the death toll continues to rise. The Gaza Health Ministry has counted 20,915 since the start of the war, including 241 in the last 24 hours.
Two Palestinians were also killed Tuesday in Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, after the Israeli army said they opened fire on youths who threw stones and Molotov cocktails at soldiers.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo, Bassam Masoud in Gaza, Emily Rose in Jerusalem; French version Tangi Salaün, editing by Zhifan Liu)
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