Dozens killed in their homes in renewed Israeli attack on Gaza City

During a week-long Israeli military assault on Gaza City, dozens were killed as Palestinians were trapped in their homes and unable to leave.

A boy sits among rubble at the Yarmouk sports stadium in Gaza City, Friday, July 5, 2024. (AP Photo/AP Photo)

Palestinian officials and rescue workers said bodies were still lying on the streets on Thursday and had not yet been collected, a day after the Israeli army dropped leaflets urging residents to leave the city via “safe routes” and head south.

According to a Reuters report, Gaza’s Health Ministry said people were killed in their homes in Gaza’s Tel Al Hawa and Sabra districts and rescue workers were unable to reach them.

Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office, reported that 60 people were killed in Israeli air strikes on central Gaza on Tuesday.

According to Reuters, “Local residents said Israeli tanks entered Gaza’s Tel Al-Hawa, Shejaia and Sabra neighborhoods and shelled streets and buildings, forcing them to flee their homes. Israeli military orders to evacuate several districts in eastern and western Gaza, including these neighborhoods, were subsequently posted on social media.”

The emergency services said at least 30 people had been killed in the Tel Al-Hawa and Rimal areas and that bodies could not be recovered from the streets there.

In another report on Thursday, Reuters correspondents said that as Israeli forces withdrew from parts of Gaza City, there were “dozens of deaths and destroyed homes and streets in the largest urban area of the Palestinian enclave…”

When the Gaza Civil Emergency Service was able to enter the area, 60 Palestinian bodies were recovered there. This report was later updated to 70 bodies recovered from the attacks in the Tal al-Hawa area, according to Al Jazeera.

On Friday, Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for the Gaza Strip’s civil defense, said: “There are corpses scattered on the streets, dismembered bodies, the corpses of entire families. And in one family’s house, which was completely burned down, there are corpses.”

While the US-Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip razed most of Gaza City by the end of 2023, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians returned to what was left of their homes before being ordered to vacate again.

Many Palestinians refused to leave Gaza because they had concluded that there was no safe zone for them anywhere and they did not believe Israeli claims that they could leave the city safely. Residents also said Guardian that they feared that if they left they would not be able to return.

In a text message to Reuters, 30-year-old Mohammed Ali said: “We will die, but we will not go south. We have endured hunger and bombs for nine months and are ready to die here as martyrs.”

Reuters also reported: “Dozens of residents returned to assess the damage on Friday after civil emergency teams put out fires in the early hours. Reuters images showed destroyed streets and buildings, including the former UNRWA headquarters. On the floor of Al-Ahli hospital lay bodies wrapped in white shrouds with the names of the dead women and men.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reported that 6,400 Palestinians have been reported missing since the genocide started ten months ago by the Israeli government with the support of US imperialism.

Many of the missing are believed to be buried under the rubble of the destruction, some were buried without identification or are being held in Israeli custody. Others were separated from their families and have been unable to make contact with them in the chaos of the siege. Since April, around 1,100 new cases of missing persons have been reported to the ICRC.

In a statement, ICRC spokeswoman Sarah Davies said: “Every week we receive between 500 and 2,500 calls to our hotlines, and the majority of these are enquiries about missing family members.”

Davies continued: “Unfortunately, in such chaotic situations, people can easily become separated from each other. People panic, sometimes it is dark and visibility is poor. If there are explosions nearby, people flee and lose each other.”

Since October 7, the ICRC has reported that more than 8,700 Palestinians are missing in Gaza and has contacted 7,429 Palestinian families to gather information. In about 2,300 cases, families have found their relatives either alive or dead.

The Guardian reported that Muhammad Naji, a resident of al-Falluja in the north of the Gaza Strip, said that emergency teams were able to rescue eight people from the rubble following a recent attack, but that 17 others were buried under the rubble and that some of his cousins were missing.

Naji said: “We don’t know anything about them. The whole building collapsed on their heads. Are they dead? Are they still alive? No one can tell us anything. … If my cousins are dead, we want to bury them. We can neither think nor comprehend.”

The Lancet A medical journal last week published a conservative estimate that the true death toll in Gaza since October 2023 could be over 186,000, with the official death toll just over 37,000.

The White House and the US Department of Defense on Thursday exposed the fraud of the “humanitarian pier” built in March and announced that the operation would soon be “suspended.” Major General Patrick Ryder said in a statement that US troops tried to reconnect the floating structure to Gaza’s shore on Wednesday but were unable to do so due to “technical and weather-related problems.”

The pier was announced and built as part of a public relations campaign announced by President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address to cover up the U.S. government’s role in funding and arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It was absurd that a $230 million floating pier that was a complete failure would do anything to address the hunger and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

Despite the obvious, Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan claimed Thursday that the Pier mission was a success “in trying to deal with the heartbreaking humanitarian situation” resulting from the nine-month-long U.S. genocide. “I consider any outcome that results in more food and more humanitarian supplies getting to the people of Gaza a success,” Sullivan added.

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