Israeli strikes kill dozens in Gaza, Lebanon as ceasefire remains elusive | News about the Israel-Palestine conflict

The Israeli army has killed dozens more in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon as it expands its attacks, while ceasefire talks appear to be going nowhere.

At least 55 people have been killed in Gaza in the past 24 hours, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry. Fourteen of them were killed on Friday in a series of Israeli airstrikes and shelling from warships in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, medical officials at al-Awda Hospital said.

“People are arriving at the hospital in animal carts because it is quite difficult for civil defense and frontline emergency workers to reach the area as Israeli military drones are actively operating there,” Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reported from Deir el. -Balah when the bombs fell a few kilometers away.

One of the targets in Nuseirat was a school converted into a shelter for displaced Palestinians, bringing the total number of such centers hit since the start of the war to nearly 200.

Abu Mohammed al-Taweel, a witness to the Israeli attacks on Nuseirat, said he saw many people killed after several family homes were targeted, with a five-month-old child among the dead.

“The Israelis are eager to kill Palestinian women and children. There are no resistance fighters in the camp. They hit us without any prior warning,” he told Al Jazeera.

“We are here to die. We are ready to die. I have not been killed today, but I will certainly be killed tomorrow. There are no safe places here in the Gaza Strip. Massacres are being committed everywhere.”

The Israeli assault on the enclave continued elsewhere, with deadly strikes killing dozens more in Khan Younis in the south and Gaza City in the north.

The situation continues to be catastrophic in northern Gaza, where the Israeli army continues a siege while blocking humanitarian aid and trying to force Palestinians to leave the area.

“The situation unfolding in northern Gaza is apocalyptic,” the heads of major United Nations agencies said on Friday. “The entire Palestinian population in northern Gaza is at imminent risk of death from disease, starvation and violence,” added the joint statement by the heads of organizations that make up the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee.

On Thursday, Israeli forces targeted several areas of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the north, including its stockpiles of medicine delivered five days earlier by the World Health Organization and a water desalination plant.

At least two children died in the intensive care unit after the hospital’s generators shut down and the oxygen station was targeted, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

The official death toll in Gaza now stands at 43,259, with 101,827 injured, but the actual death toll is believed to be much higher.

The Baalbek “war crimes” attacks in Lebanon

The Israeli military is steadily expanding its assault on Lebanon as well.

Ten people were killed and 26 wounded in Israeli strikes on the Baalbek-Hermel region of eastern Lebanon on Friday, the country’s Ministry of Public Health said.

Several evacuation orders were issued Friday morning for residents of several neighborhoods in the southern suburbs of the capital, Beirut. A series of massive strikes followed, leaving buildings destroyed and the Lebanese scrambling to open roads for ambulances to reach the victims.

But emergency responders and civil defense crews are also regularly targeted. At least six medics were killed in multiple Israeli attacks over the course of three hours on Thursday, bringing the total number of paramedics killed since the start of the assault to 178, with 279 wounded and 246 vehicles hit.

This week, the Israeli military issued forced evacuation orders – which are effectively killing zones – for dozens of villages and towns in southern Lebanon, along with the major ancient cities of Baalbek and Tyre.

Two buildings were leveled Friday in one of the latest Israeli raids near the Imam Hussein Mosque in Tyre’s Raml neighborhood, as paramedics struggled to pull bodies from the rubble.

“Ancient Phoenician cities steeped in history are in deep danger of being left in ruins,” said Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon, of the threat posed by Israeli attacks on Tire and Baalbek.

Lebanon’s interim prime minister, Najib Mikati, called the attacks on those cities and Israel’s evacuation orders “war crimes,” along with other killings and destruction, while maintaining contact with counterparts in the United States and the region to get a ceasefire.

Even though American and Lebanese officials initially expressed hope this week that a ceasefire could be reached in Lebanon, there was no sign of progress after Washington’s envoys returned home from talks in Israel .

Mikati said the expansion of the attacks “confirms the Israeli enemy’s rejection of all efforts to secure a ceasefire”.

Israel demanded that Hezbollah withdraw from Lebanon’s southern borders and disarm, or reserve the right to carry out attacks in Lebanon.