Gaza: heavy fighting continues in south of enclave

After weeks of US pressure to ease its military offensive, Israel says that its forces are moving from full-blown warfare to a more targeted campaign in northern Gaza, while maintaining intensive combat in southern areas, Reuters has reported. The occupation state said that its troops had killed around 40 Palestinian fighters and raided a Hamas compound and tunnel shafts since Monday in Khan Younis, the main city in the south.

According to the Israeli army, nine of its soldiers were killed yesterday, mostly from engineering units operating against Hamas tunnels, in one of the deadliest days of the ground assault for Israeli forces. The deaths brought its total admitted war losses to 187.

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The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza, meanwhile, said that 57 Palestinians were killed by Israeli air strikes and 65 were wounded in the past 24 hours. The casualties were taken to Al-Aqsa Hospital in the centre of the 45 km (28 mile) long Gaza Strip.

The vast humanitarian crisis has put pressure in particular on the United States, Israel’s closest ally, to press for the assault to be scaled back.

The UN humanitarian office OCHA pointed out that, “As casualties rise, the ability to treat them continues to be in jeopardy.” It said that three hospitals in central Gaza and Khan Younis, including Al-Aqsa, were “at risk of closure due to the issuance of evacuation orders [by Israel] in nearby areas and the ongoing conduct of hostilities nearby.”

Sean Casey, the World Health Organisation’s Emergency Medical Teams coordinator in Gaza, said that, “We are seeing the health system collapse at a very rapid pace.” Medical staff and patients were fleeing for their lives, including an estimated 600 patients from one facility, and 66 health workers are in Israeli detention. Only about a third of Gaza’s hospitals, all in southern and central Gaza, are still even partially functional.

Casey pointed out that many staff at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis had joined hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians crowded into shelters in the strip’s southernmost tip, leaving just one doctor for more than 100 burn victims.

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