Heavy bombing continues, while Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel has shown unparalleled ‘morality’ in its conduct in Gaza
At least 68 people have been killed in Gaza in the past 24 hours, as the three-month-old conflict between Israel and Hamas rolls into the new year with no end in sight and only tentative Israeli government plans for discussing the day after the war is over.
The Hamas-run territory’s health authority said about 48 people were killed overnight on Sunday in heavy Israeli bombing of Gaza City, where pockets of fierce fighting are ongoing despite claims by the Israel Defense Forces that the north of the blockaded exclave is largely under Israeli operational control.
Another strike killed 20 people sheltering at al-Aqsa University in the west of Gaza City, witnesses said.
In the southern half of Gaza, areas previously identified as evacuation zones for the strip’s population of 2.3 million, about 85% of whom have fled their homes, have been heavily attacked with airstrikes and artillery over the past week as Israel broadens its ground operation.
Israel is now targeting Nuseirat, Maghazi and Bureij, a belt of overcrowded and poorly serviced camps in the centre of the strip built to house Palestinian refugees who fled their homes during the 1948 war over Israel’s creation. About 35 people were killed by bombardment of the area on Sunday.
“They were innocent people,” Hussein Siam, whose relatives were among the dead in a strike on the central neighbourhood of Zuwaida, told the Associated Press. “Israeli warplanes bombarded the whole family.”
The camps’ populations have swelled with hundreds of thousands of newly displaced people since the war broke out after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, in which the militant group killed 1,140 people and seized up to another 250 as hostages.
Israel’s retaliatory war has killed about 21,800 people, injured another 55,000 and left approximately half of Gaza’s housing stock in ruins from bombings and ground fighting.
