The deadliest fighting in years between Israelis and Palestinians showed no signs of stopping on Wednesday, with Israel’s military continuing to carry out airstrikes in the Gaza Strip and Hamas militants continuing to bombard Israel with barrages of rockets.
United Nation officials are urging peace on both sides as the death toll continues to rise. “Stop the fire immediately,” Tor Wennesland, the U.N.’s Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. “We’re escalating towards a full scale war.”
In Gaza, 53 people have been killed, including 14 children and three women, and 6 Israelis were killed by rocket fire, including a soldier, three women and a child – the deadliest outbreak of violence since the 2014 Gaza War.
At least 320 have been wounded in Gaza, including 86 children and 39 women. Dozens in Israel have been wounded.
There was no sign that either side is willing to back down. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to expand the offensive, saying “this will take time.” Hamas has called for a full-scale intifada, or uprising.
The conflict continues
Rockets streamed out of Gaza and Israel pounded the territory with airstrikes Wednesday as the bloody conflict continued.
Palls of gray smoke rose in Gaza as Israeli airstrikes levelled two apartment towers and hammered the militant group’s multiple security installations, destroying the central police compound.
In Israel, barrages of hundreds of rockets fired by Gaza’s Hamas rulers and other militants at times overwhelmed missile defenses and brought air raid sirens and explosions echoing across Tel Aviv, Israel’s biggest metropolitan area, and other cities.
Since Monday, militants have fired more 1,050 rockets from Gaza, according to the Israeli military, and Israel has conducted hundreds of strikes in the tiny territory where 2 million Palestinians have lived under a crippling Israeli-Egyptian blockade since Hamas took power in 2007. Two infantry brigades were sent to the area, indicating preparations for a possible ground invasion.
About 130 rockets hit Tel Aviv Tuesday night, forcing the city’s airport to close.
Many rockets were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, but some struck the city of Tel Aviv.
On Wednesday, Israel stepped up its targeting of Hamas’ military wing. The military and internal security agency said they carried out a “complex and first-of-its-kind operation” that killed the Hamas commander in charge of Gaza City, the highest-ranking Hamas military figure killed by Israel since 2014, and several other senior militants involved in rocket production.
Hamas has confirmed that Bassem Issa, its Gaza City commander, was killed in an Israeli airstrike Wednesday. Issa was the highest-ranking military figure in Hamas to be killed Israel since 2014; Hamas’ statement was the first time they have acknowledged the death of militants in this round of fighting with Israel.
The armed wing of Hamas said Issa was killed “along with a few of his fellow brothers of leaders and holy fighters” during the fighting that has been going on for two days in Gaza.
In one of the fiercest attacks, Israeli fighter jets dropped two bombs on a 14-story building in Gaza City, collapsing it. The building, located on the city’s busiest shopping street in the Roman neighborhood, housed businesses in addition to offices for Hamas’ Al-Aqsa satellite channel.
Airstrikes also brought down a 12-story office building, housed Hamas offices as well as other businesses, and heavily damaged a nine-story building with residential apartments, medical companies, a dental clinic and, Israel said, Hamas intelligence offices. In both cases, Israel fired warning shots, allowing people to flee.
Soon after, Hamas fired 100 rockets at the Israeli desert town of Beersheba in what it said was retaliation.
‘There is almost no safe place in Gaza’
Samah Haboub, a mother of four in Gaza, said she was thrown across her bedroom in a “moment of horror” by an airstrike on an apartment tower next door. She and her children, aged 3 to 14, ran down the stairway of their apartment block along with other residents, many of them screaming and crying.
“There is almost no safe place in Gaza,” she said.
One strike hit a taxi in Gaza City, killing a man, woman and driver insider, and a second strike killed two men nearby on the street, witnesses who brought the bodies told the AP at the hospital. Several other bystanders, including a woman, were wounded.
In the Israeli city of Lod, a 52-year-old man and his 16-year-old daughter, reportedly Arab citizens of Israel, were killed early Wednesday when a rocket from Gaza hit the courtyard of their home.
The Jerusalem turmoil and the ensuing battle come at a time when the long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process is virtually non-existent.
It has been seven years since the two sides held formal negotiations. Israel’s political scene pays little attention, and the peace process was hardly an issue in the country’s string of recent elections. Arab nations, including several that recently reached normalization deals with Israel, rarely push for any resolution.
The result has left the nearly 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem living in a limbo — caught among Israeli occupation, accelerated Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, a weak Palestinian Authority that recently canceled elections, and Hamas rule and the blockade that are impoverishing Gaza.
How did the conflict start?
For weeks, Palestinian protesters and Israeli police have clashed on a daily basis in and around Jerusalem’s Old City, home to major religious sites sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims and the emotional epicenter of the Middle East conflict.
Clashes between Israel’s police and Palestinian protesters took place Monday in and around the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City, a holy site for Muslims and Jews alike.
The recent nightly clashes began at the start of Ramadan, when Israeli police placed barriers outside the Old City’s Damascus Gate, a popular gathering place after the evening prayers during the holy month when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. They later removed the barriers, but then protests escalated over the threatened eviction of dozens of Palestinian families from the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
The families have been embroiled in a long legal battle with ideological Jewish settlers who seek to acquire property in crowded Palestinian neighborhoods just outside the Old City. Israel portrays it as a private real-estate dispute, but the families’ plight has attracted global attention.
International reaction
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel will use “an iron fist if needed” to stop widespread protests by Arab citizens that have resulted in injuries, arrests, and property damage, and said that the country will “stop the anarchy” after deploying Border Police forces to calm unrest in recent days in the cities of Lod and Acre
“Hamas and Islamic Jihad have paid, and will pay, a very heavy price for their aggression,” Netanyahu said late Tuesday. “This campaign will take time.”
In the United States, Secretary of State Antony Blinken says he’s sending a senior American diplomat to the Middle East to urge leaders on both sides to de-escalate the conflict.
Blinken dispatched Hady Amr, the deputy secretary of state for Israel and Palestinian affairs, to travel immediately to the region, the most senior U.S. diplomat tasked with the matter.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday that President Joe Biden “will nominate a qualified, experienced ambassador to Israel over the coming weeks,” and reiterated that the administration’s priority is “de-escalation as we look to protecting people in the region.”
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he wants to see an “urgent de-escalation of tensions” between Israel and Hamas amid the most severe outbreak of violence since the 2014 Gaza war.
“I am urging Israel and the Palestinians to step back from the brink and for both sides to show restraint,” Johnson wrote on Twitter. “The UK is deeply concerned by the growing violence and civilian casualties and we want to see an urgent de-escalation of tensions.”
British Foreign Office Minister James Cleverly told Parliament that Britain “unequivocally condemns the firing of rockets at Jerusalem and other locations in Israel.” He called Hamas’ conduct “terrorism” and called on militants to “end their incitement and rocket fire against Israel.”
Cleverly said Israel has a “legitimate right to self-defense,” but added that in doing so, ”it is vital that all actions are proportionate, in line with international humanitarian law and make every effort to avoid civilian casualties.”
Germany’s Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht on Wednesday condemned the rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza, saying Germany is standing “strongly on the side of Israel.” She called for the attacks on Israel to stop, adding that Israel has the right to protect itself.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the international community should “give Israel a strong and deterrent lesson” over its conduct toward the Palestinians, according to the Turkish Presidential Communications Directorate. The two leaders talked by phone on Wednesday about the escalating confrontation.
Pakistan has condemned Israel’s actions and called for Muslim nations to stand by the Palestinians, with Prime Minister Imran Khan taking to Twitter to say: “We stand with Gaza and Palestine.”
Meanwhile, Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, urged for the violence to stop, warning of the possibility of war crimes as the conflict continues, according to CNN.
“I note with great concern the escalation of violence in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as in and around Gaza, and the possible commission of crimes under the Rome Statute,” Bensouda wrote in a statement posted to Twitter. “I echo the call from the international community for calm, restraint and a stop to the violence.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
