IDF tanks said advancing into Gaza’s Shejaiya amid strikes on the neighborhood
Residents seen fleeing with belongings as IDF calls on Palestinians to evacuate; Hamas’s Mashaal says Gaza destruction part of the ‘march of our people toward liberation’
The Israeli military called on Palestinians in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood to evacuate the area and head toward the designated “humanitarian zone” in the Strip’s south on Thursday as Palestinian media reported a series of Israeli strikes and tanks advancing into the neighborhood.
Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee, the Israel Defense Forces’s Arabic-language spokesman, published a list of the zones that needed to be evacuated alongside the announcement.
Residents in a messaging group shared video showing large numbers of people fleeing the neighborhood on foot with their belongings in their arms.
First responders with Gaza’s Civil Defense, which is part of the Hamas-run government, said airstrikes hit five homes in the neighborhood, killing at least three people and wounding another six. It said rescuers were still digging through the rubble for survivors.
There was no immediate comment from the military.
Residents said they were taken by surprise by the sound of tanks approaching and firing in the early afternoon, with drones also attacking after overnight strikes of the city, which Israel had swept early in the war.
The IDF last operated in Shejaiya in April.
“It sounded as if the war is restarting, a series of bombings that destroyed several houses in our area and shook the buildings,” Mohammad Jamal, 25, a resident of Gaza City, told Reuters via a chat app.
لحظة قصف الاحتلال لمنازل المدنيين في حي الشجاعية شرق غزة قبل قليل. pic.twitter.com/q07Hq4JNwi
— Newpress | نيو برس (@NewpressPs) June 27, 2024
The armed wing of Hamas ally Islamic Jihad said it had detonated a pre-planted explosive device against an Israeli tank east of the district.
Israel accuses the terrorists of hiding among civilians and says it warns displaced people to get out of the way of its operations against the fighters.
Meanwhile, in the south of the Gaza Strip, a group of Hamas operatives at a school in Khan Younis were targeted in an airstrike, the military said on Thursday.
According to the IDF, the al-Hasna school was being used by Hamas as a command center where operatives “planned, directed and carried out many attacks” against Israeli forces in the Strip.
The operatives were hit by fighter jets and drones.
The IDF said that the strike was “carefully planned and carried out,” and it used precision munitions to mitigate harm to civilians.
Senior Hamas official Khaled Mashaal acknowledged in an interview with Sky News Arabic on Thursday the damage wrought on the territory in the aftermath of the terrorist organization’s October 7 attack.
“Gaza is now destroyed,” he said. “Every fair-minded person sees that this is absolutely true.”
However, he said, this is all part of the “march of our people toward liberation.”
Meanwhile, since the start of the war, the United States has transferred security-related aid totaling some $6.5 billion to Israel, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing an American official.
The unnamed official said almost half of that was provided last month alone.
The report indicated the official was seeking to counter charges of insufficient US backing for Israel amid the conflict.
“This is a massive, massive undertaking,” the official said, noting that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and his teams sat down with American officials and went over the “hundreds of separate items” sent to Israel during their visit to Washington this week.
The war in Gaza broke out on October 7 with Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel in which terrorists massacred some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 37,500 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 combatants in battle and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.
According to an IDF tally, 315 troops have been killed during the ground offensive against Hamas and amid operations along the Gaza border. The toll includes a police officer killed in a hostage rescue mission. A civilian Defense Ministry contractor has also been killed in the Strip.
