Middle East

Gaza: 99 Palestinians killed and 169 injured in 24 hours as war’s death toll continues to rise

Scores die in Israeli strike on school sheltering displaced families and an orphanage as conflict nears one-year mark

Israeli soldiers beside destroyed buildings in the Gaza Strip: Israel’s military offensive there has killed at least 41,788 Palestinians and wounded 96,794 since October 7th. Photograph: Leo Correa/AP
Thu Oct 03 2024 - 18:25

The health ministry in Gaza said on Thursday that 99 Palestinian had been killed and 169 wounded in the previous 24 hours.

Medics said scores of people were killed on Wednesday in an Israeli strike that hit a school sheltering displaced families in Gaza City, while another struck the al-Amal Orphan Society, which also houses displaced persons. On Thursday, an Israeli air strike in Gaza City killed five Palestinians, while another air strike on Nuseirat killed one man and wounded several others, medics said.

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Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 41,788 Palestinians and wounded 96,794 since October 7th, the health ministry said on Thursday.

As the war in Gaza triggered by the cross-border Hamas attack on Israel nears its first anniversary on October 7th, there has been no let-up in Israeli military operations against the Palestinian Islamist group.

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Israel says 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage in that attack, triggering the war that has devastated Gaza, displacing most of its 2.3 million population.

The Israeli military announced it had killed three senior Hamas officials in an air strike that targeted them in Gaza three months ago.

It identified the three men as Rawhi Mushtaha, a confidant of Hamas Gaza chief Yehya al-Sinwar; Sameh al-Saraj, a senior security official; and Sami Odeh, Hamas’s general security service commander.

There was no immediate comment from Hamas.

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Israel has killed Abdel-Aziz Salha, a West Bank Hamas militant who had been jailed for life for taking part in the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah in 2000 but was later deported to Gaza in a prisoner swap, Hamas media and medics said.

Salha was killed in an Israeli air strike on a tent inside al-Aklouk School, which shelters displaced Palestinians, in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip earlier on Thursday, medics said. There was no immediate Israeli comment on Salha’s death or whether he had been deliberately targeted.

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The 2000 incident took place in Ramallah in the West Bank, where the reservists were seized at a Palestinian checkpoint, brought to a police station and set upon by a mob that choked and beat them to death. It followed the funeral of a 17-year-old Palestinian killed by Israeli fire, and two weeks during which several other Palestinians were killed across the West Bank.

Salha was arrested by Israel in 2001 and sentenced to a lifetime in prison.

He was freed along with more than 1,000 other Palestinians in an October 2011 swap with Hamas for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had spent five years in captivity in Gaza. – Reuters