Gaza toll hits 165 as thousands flee homes after Israel warned them to leave ahead of threatened attacks on rocket-launching sites
Israeli navy commandos launched a ground operation overnight in the north of the Gaza Strip, the first since the offensive against Hamas began, Israeli public radio said early Sunday while Israeli strikes on Gaza killed a teenage boy and a woman, raising the overall death toll to 165 as the punishing air campaign entered its sixth day.
According to emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra, one strike on the northern town of Jabaliya struck a house, killing a 14-year-old boy. Shortly afterwards, another strike killed a woman in the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza, he said. Elsewhere, a man injured in an earlier strike died of his wounds, hiking the toll to 165, Qudra said.
In the meanwhile, the brief incursion targeted a rocket launcher site, Israeli public radio said. The armed branch of Hamas confirmed that Israeli commandos had exchanged gunfire with some Palestinian fighters.
A military spokesperson later said four Israeli soldiers had been lightly wounded during the operation.
“During the mission a gunfight broke out, started by some terrorists operating at the site, during which four Israeli soldiers were lightly wounded,” said the spokesperson.
The Ezzedine al Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, confirmed the exchange of gunfire “between our fighters and soldiers of the Zionist navy which tried to penetrate the zone of Sudanyia” in northwest Gaza.
THOUSANDS FLEE:
Thousands fled their homes in a Gaza town on Sunday after Israel warned them to leave ahead of threatened attacks on rocket-launching sites.
“Those who fail to comply with the instructions will endanger their lives and the lives of their families. Beware,” read a leaflet dropped by the Israeli military in the town of Beit Lahiya, near the border with Israel.
Militants in the Gaza Strip kept up rockets salvoes deep into the Jewish state and the worst bout of Israel-Palestinian bloodshed in two years showed no signs of abating despite mounting international pressure to cease fire.
A long-range salvo on Sunday morning triggered air raid sirens at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion international airport, which has not been hit in the hostilities and where flights have been operating normally, and some city suburbs.
On Saturday night, Hamas made good on a threat to send rockets streaking toward Tel Aviv at 9pm and other areas in heavily populated central Israel.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis sought shelter as Palestinians in the streets of Gaza City cheered the launchings, the biggest strike yet on the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.
Those rockets and the ones unleashed on Sunday were intercepted by the Israeli-built, and partly US-funded, Iron Dome missile defense system that has proved effective against Hamas’s most powerful weaponry.
No one has been killed by the more than 800 rockets the Israeli military said has been fired since the offensive began, and during Saturday night’s barrage, customers in Tel Aviv beachfront cafes shouted their approval as they watched the projectiles being shot out of the sky.
Israeli leaflets dropped on Beit Lahiya, where 70,000 Palestinians live, said civilians in three of its 10 neighborhoods were “requested to evacuate their residences” and move south, deeper into the Gaza Strip, by 12pm.
The Gaza Interior Ministry, in a statement on Hamas radio, dismissed the Israeli warnings as “psychological warfare” and instructed those who left their homes to return and others to stay put.
The warnings cited roads that residents could use safely and said Israeli forces intended to attack “every area from where rockets are being launched”. The military did not say in the leaflet whether the strike would include ground troops.
It was the first time Israel had warned Palestinians to vacate dwellings in such a wide area. Previous warnings, by telephone or so-called “knock-on-the-door” missiles without explosive warheads, had been directed at individual homes slated for attack.
At least 4,000 people fled Beit Lahiya and crowded into eight UN-run schools in Gaza City on Sunday, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency said.
Some arrived on donkey carts filled with children, luggage and mattresses, while others came by car or taxi. One man, still in his pajamas, said some residents had received phone calls warning them to clear out.
“What could we do? We had to run in order to save the lives of our children,” said Salem Abu Halima, 25, a father of two.
