Death toll tops 10,000 as Israel steps up attacks

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: The death toll in Gaza has surpassed 10,000 people, the Hamas-run health ministry said Monday after nearly one month of bombardment by Israel whose offensive against Palestinian militants showed signs of intensifying.

Determined to destroy Hamas whose October 7 attack left 1,400 dead in Israel, most of them civilians, and saw over 240 hostages taken according to Israeli officials, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed no letup despite mounting calls for a ceasefire.

“The unfolding catastrophe makes the need for a humanitarian ceasefire more urgent with every passing hour,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters at UN headquarters. The dead in Gaza include more than 4,000 children, the health ministry said. Some 292 people were killed in a barrage overnight that hit two paediatric hospitals and Gaza´s only psychiatric hospital, it said. “These are massacres! They destroyed three houses over the heads of their inhabitants -- women and children,” Mahmud Meshmesh, resident of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, told AFP. “We have already taken 40 bodies out of the rubble,” he said as crowds prayed around corpses wrapped in white shrouds. The United States also acknowledged there have been “thousands” of civilian casualties in Gaza as Israel battles Hamas in the narrow coastal territory, but did not provide an exact figure. “As it relates to civilian casualties in Gaza... we know the numbers are in the thousands,” Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Pat Ryder told journalists when asked about the health ministry´s toll in Hamas-run Gaza.

The Israeli army said it had pounded Gaza with “significant” strikes on 450 targets, having said last week it had already hit over 12,000.

“We will be able to dismantle Hamas, stronghold after stronghold, battalion after battalion, until we achieve the ultimate goal, which is to rid the Gaza Strip -- the entire Gaza Strip -- of Hamas,” Israeli army spokesman Jonathan Conricus said. Israeli troops and Hamas fighters have engaged in fierce house-to-house combat in densely populated north Gaza, where the UN says the war has sent some 1.5 million people fleeing to other parts of the territory. The total included 292 killed in the overnight barrage which hit two paediatric hospitals and Gaza’s only psychiatric hospital, the ministry said. Around 200 people were killed as a result, according to the director of Gaza City’s largest hospital Al-Shifa, who says people carried dead bodies to the hospital by donkey as communications outages left people unable to reach ambulance services.

IDF said Israeli troops have split Gaza into two territories.“The north and south (of Gaza) have been cut off from one another and is under IDF control,” Lt. Col. Peter Lerner told CNN’s Rosemary Church . This “indeed means that we are pushing forward towards Gaza City, we have encircled Gaza City two days ago and we are moving forward,” Lerner added. He claimed the IDF will “allow for a corridor in order for the residents of northern Gaza and Gaza City to move southward.” CNN has previously documented Palestinian civilians being killed by Israeli strikes around evacuation zones, underscoring the reality that evacuation zones and warning alerts from the IDF haven’t guaranteed safety for civilians in the densely populated Gaza Strip.

In Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, a 20-year-old Israeli border policewoman died after a knife-wielding Palestinian assailant stabbed her in front of a police station, the force said. And elsewhere in the West Bank, Israeli forces killed four Palestinians, according to the Ramallah-based Palestinian health ministry. A top Hamas official in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, said the group, which fired 16 rockets from Lebanon towards northern Israel, would never accept a puppet government in Gaza and that “no force on earth could annihilate” it.

The UN chief Antonio Guterres tells reporters Gaza is “becoming a graveyard for children”. “Hundreds of girls and boys are reportedly being killed and injured every day,” he said. “More journalists have reportedly been killed over a four-week period than in any conflict in at least three decades,” he said. “More United Nations aid workers have been killed than in any comparable period in the history of our organisation.” “I joined the UN family in mourning 89 of our UNRWA colleagues who have been killed in Gaza, many of them together with members of their family,” Guterres added.

The Rafah crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt reopened to allow the evacuation of foreigners and dual nationals, the Hamas government said, ending a two-day closure prompted by a dispute over the passage of ambulances.

US President Joe Biden and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed the potential for “pauses” in the Israeli military´s operations in Gaza. “The two leaders discussed the possibility of tactical pauses to provide civilians with opportunities to safely depart from areas of ongoing fighting, to ensure assistance is reaching civilians in need, and to enable potential hostage releases,” the White House said in a statement.

Earlier, on his regional tour, Blinken called for “humanitarian pauses” while rejecting Arab countries’ demands for a ceasefire. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was travelling across his country’s remote northeast, apparently snubbing Blinken.

The South African government said it would recall all its diplomats from Israel to signal its concern over the situation in Gaza. Earlier, Turkey, Jordan, Bolivia, Honduras, Colombia, Chile and Bahrain also did the same.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi is expected to attend an OIC summit in the Saudi capital on Sunday addressing the Israel-Hamas war, a source familiar with the preparations told AFP. It is planned to take place one day after an emergency meeting of Arab League leaders on the war, also in Riyadh. A US nuclear-powered Ohio-class submarine is in the Middle East to help prevent the Israel-Hamas war from spiraling into a broader conflict, the Pentagon said. Some Ohio-class submarines are armed with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, while others are configured to carry more than 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Also on Sunday, William Burns, the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency arrived in Israel to focus on talks with politicians and intelligence officials about intelligence gathering across the Middle East. The CIA head is apparently on a multi-country tour of the Middle East, and has plans to go to Egypt, Qatar and the UAE.

“They will discuss issues of mutual interest including the situation in Gaza, support for hostage negotiations, and the American commitment to continue to deter state and non-state actors from expanding the conflict between Israel and Hamas,” the official explained. “This will strengthen our commitment to intelligence cooperation, especially in areas such as counterterrorism and security.” Burns also met with Mossad director David Barnea.