Israel reportedly bombs Gaza areas declared safe zones, as Palestinian death toll nears 18,000

GAZA – Israel’s relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip has hit areas it had told Palestinians to evacuate to in the territory’s south.

Aljazeera reported that the strikes came a day after the United States vetoed a United Nations resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, despite its wide support.

Gaza residents “are being told to move like human pinballs – ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survival,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the United Nations Security Council before Friday’s vote.

Two hospitals in central and southern Gaza received 133 bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli bombings over the past 24 hours, health ministry officials in Gaza said on Saturday.

Dozens of people reportedly held funeral prayers in the hospital’s courtyard before taking the bodies for burial – a scene that has become routine over the past two months of war.

In the southern city of Khan Younis, which had been the focus of Israel’s military operations over the past week, the Nasser Hospital received the bodies of 62 people, the ministry said.

More than 2,200 Palestinians had been killed since the December 1, 2023 collapse of a weeklong truce, about two-thirds of them women and children.

With the war now in its third month, the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 17,700.

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