Death toll nears 300 as Israel presses Gaza offensive

GAZA CITY // Forty-four Gazans were killed yesterday as Israel pressed a major ground offensive in the enclave, raising the Palestinian death toll in 11 days of fighting to 285.

Diplomats stepped up efforts to halt the bloodshed in and around the battered Gaza Strip while Pope Francis demanded an immediate ceasefire in a phone call to Israeli president Shimon Peres and his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas.

Mr Abbas reached out for French help to lobby Hamas allies Qatar and Turkey to pressure the Islamists into accepting a truce during talks in Cairo with the foreign minister Laurent Fabius.

In the face of Israel’s land, sea and air offensive that has sent terrified civilians running for cover, Hamas leadership remained defiant and warned Israel it would “drown in the swamp of Gaza”.

As Gaza residents spoke of a night of terror, with gun battles in the south and all-night shelling in the north, Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered the military to prepare for “the possibility of a significant broadening of the ground activity”.

Afterwards, the Israeli premier convened his security cabinet to discuss plans for a possible expansion of the campaign, which began on July 8 with the aim of stopping cross-border rocket fire.

The assault opens a new, potentially extended and bloodier stage in the conflict following 10 days of more than 2,000 Israeli airstrikes against Gaza that had failed to halt Hamas rocket fire on Israeli cities.

The US president, Barack Obama, said yesterday that while the US supported Israel’s right to defend itself, “the United States and our friends and allies are deeply concerned about the risks of further escalation and the loss of more innocent life”.

The speaker of the Arab Parliament yesterday condemned the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, particularly those targeting Palestinian children.

Citing the recent killing of four children who were playing on the beach and three others who were playing soccer on the roof of their apartment, Ahmed Mohammed Al Jarwan also condemned “the absolute silence of the international community about these brutal crimes being perpetrated against all humanity and ethics”.

The ground operation, which began in the Gaza periphery around midnight yesterday UAE time, sent thousands of people fleeing west to escape the fighting, with a UN agency saying the numbers of displaced had almost doubled overnight. “The number of people coming to UNRWA seeking sanctuary from the fighting in Gaza has nearly doubled today. It has risen from 22,000 to over 40,000,” said Chris Gunness, a spokesman for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, saying they were staying in 34 of the agency’s schools.

By midmorning, the road between Gaza City and Khan Yunis was deserted with only a single minibus, packed with passengers, careering south, its windows covered with makeshift white flags.

During Friday prayers, imams at Gaza’s 1,400 mosques relayed a single message: “Be patient and strong, victory will come.”

But it was little comfort for those on the ground with hospitals overwhelmed by a flood of patients.

“The situation is very, very difficult,” said Dr Kamel Zaqzuq at Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis.

“This is much, much more difficult than the last war,” he said, referring to the previous major conflict between Israel and Hamas militants in November 2012.

With food supplies running desperately low, the World Food Programme said it had distributed emergency food rations and food vouchers to more than 20,000 displaced people since the conflict began. But with the ground operation, it was gearing up for a huge increase in the coming days.

“In the next few days, WFP hopes to reach 85,000 people with food distributions,” spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said.

Gaza was also struggling with a 70 per cent power cut after electricity lines from Israel were damaged, officials said.

“We usually receive 120MW and now it is zero,” said Fathi Sheikh Khalil, head of Gaza’s electricity company. “We asked the Israeli electricity company to repair some lines on their side but they said it’s too dangerous.”

Among those killed by Israeli fire were three teenagers and a five-month-old baby, raising to 285 the number of Palestinians killed, about a fifth of them children.

An Israeli civilian and a soldier were also killed.

Israel has said the aim of the ground operation was to destroy Hamas’s network of tunnels.

“It is not possible to deal with tunnels only from the air, so our soldiers are also doing that on the ground,” Mr Netanyahu said.

Israeli public opinion appears to strongly support the offensive after days of unrelenting rocket fire from Gaza and years of southern Israeli residents living under the threat. Gaza militants have fired more than 1,500 rockets at Israel over the past 11 days. Rocket fire continued across Israel yesterday, with one exploding near a kindergarten south of Tel Aviv, lightly wounding a woman nearby, the military said.

Israel pulled out all of its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but within a year it became the de facto seat of Hamas after it won a landslide victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections.

* Agence France-Presse with additional reporting by Associated Press