Israel intensified its bombardment of the Gaza Strip from “air, land and sea” over the 24-hour period between Wednesday and Thursday afternoon ahead of a truce scheduled to start on Friday, the UN reports.
“Many casualties have been reported,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) states in its latest situation report on Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Approximately 200 patients and medical staff are awaiting evacuation from the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza, which is surrounded by Israeli tanks and came under renewed fire from Israeli forces on Thursday night. The extent of the damage to the hospital, which was built with funds donated by Indonesia, was not stated.
An infant in an incubator was among three children who died at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza’s Jabalia area on Wednesday due to a lack of electricity, while there were “dozens of fatalities” from Israeli bombing in the vicinity of the hospital, the UNOCHA stated.
Air strikes on residential buildings in southern Gaza’s Rafah and Khan Younis areas on Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon killed at least 28 people and wounded many others.
During the same 24-hour period, Israeli forces killed a 14-year-old Palestinian in the occupied West Bank’s Nablus and shot and killed a Palestinian man travelling in his vehicle in Ramallah. Since 7 October, 211 Palestinians – 54 of them children – have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank. Four Israelis have been killed during the same period.
As of Thursday, 75 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the start of Israel’s ground invasion.
More than 14,800 people killed in Gaza since October 7.
