Warning for Palestinians to leave militants’ sites
Print Edition
PRIME Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday warned Palestinian civilians to immediately leave any site where militants are operating, one day after Israel took the Gaza war to a new level by flattening a 13-story apartment block.
Israeli aircraft first fired a non-explosive rocket at the building, a sign to residents to get out, before attacking it on Saturday. Seventeen people were wounded in the strike on the structure, which Israel said had housed a Hamas command center.
“I call on the inhabitants of Gaza to evacuate immediately from every site from which Hamas is carrying out terrorist activity. Every one of these places is a target for us,” Netanyahu said at a cabinet meeting.
With no end in sight to fighting now in its seventh week, Netanyahu’s tough talk could indicate a move towards bolder strikes in densely populated neighborhoods.
Thousands of homes have been destroyed or damaged in the conflict. Nearly 500,000 people have been displaced in the territory of 1.8 million where Palestinians, citing Israeli attacks that have hit schools and mosques, say no place is safe.
Israel has said Hamas bears responsibility for civilian casualties because it operates among non-combatants.
The group, it said, uses schools and mosques to store weapons and as launching sites for cross-border rocket attacks.
Palestinian health officials say 2,108 people, most of them civilians and more than 400 of them children, have been killed in the Gaza Strip since July 8, when Israel launched an offensive with the declared aim of ending Palestinian rocket fire into its territory.
Sixty-four Israeli soldiers and four civilians in Israel have been killed.
Israel launched more air strikes on Gaza yesterday, killing at least six Palestinians, medical officials said.
Palestinian militants kept up their rocket fire in what has become a war of attrition that has defied attempts by regional power Egypt to broker a durable truce.
The bombing of the Al Zafer Tower in Gaza City marked the first time in the Gaza war that Israel had brought down so tall a structure. It had housed 44 families.
It launched the attack a day after a mortar bomb killed a 4-year-old Israeli boy.
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