GAZA: Israel continued to bombard the Gaza Strip and battled Hamas as mediators called on both sides to agree to a truce and hostage release deal outlined by US President Joe Biden.
Heavy fighting flared in Gaza’s far-southern Rafah city, where Israel sent tanks and troops in early May, ignoring concerns for displaced civilians there.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on Sunday all 36 of its shelters in Rafah “are now empty”, after at least a million people have fled the city.
A Palestinian man slavages items from a waste dump atop building rubble at al-Bureij camp in the central Gaza Strip on June 2, 2024 — AFP
Witnesses said Israeli Apache helicopters struck central Rafah on Sunday, also reporting clashes there and air raids and shelling in other parts of the city. The Palestinian Red Crescent said it was “very difficult” to access Rafah because of the Israeli bombardment.
In the besieged territory’s north, Israeli helicopters fired at Gaza City’s Zeitun and Sabra areas, AFP reporters said. A hospital medic said three people were killed when an air strike hit a family apartment in Gaza City’s Daraj district.
And in central Gaza, shelling hit areas of Deir al-Balah and the Bureij and Nuseirat refugee camps, witnesses said.
At least 12 people have been killed, including women and children, in overnight attacks by Israeli forces on homes located in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis and Rafah cities, Al Jazeera reports quoting the Wafa news agency.
Earlier in the night, two Israeli attacks on homes in the Bureij and Nuseirat refugee camps in central Gaza killed 10 people, Wafa also reported.
Three children were among 10 people killed when two homes were destroyed in Israeli attacks on a neighbourhood in the east of Khan Younis. A separate attack on the home of the Abu Khater family in Khan Younis left two people dead and many wounded, Wafa reports.