A Gaza Strip strike killed two Thai workers in southern Israel on Tuesday, police said hours after Israeli air strikes toppled a six-story building in Palestinian territory that housed bookstores and education centers. With the war showing no sign of easing, the Palestinians across the region went on a general strike in a rare collective action against Israeli policies.
Violence broke out during protests in the occupied West Bank, including one in the city of Ramallah. Hundreds of Palestinians burned tires and hurled stones at an Israeli military checkpoint. Troops fired tear gas canisters at the crowd and demonstrators picked up some of them and threw them back.
One protester was killed and more than 70 others injured – including 16 from live fire – in clashes with Israeli forces in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron and other cities, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The Israeli army said two soldiers were shot in the leg and injured.
An overhead view shows the remains of a six-story building that was destroyed by an early morning Israeli air strike in Gaza City on Tuesday. (AP)
The general strike was an unusual sign of unity among the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 20% of the population, and those in the territories that Israel seized in 1967 and that the Palestinians have long sought for a future state. It threatened to widen the conflict after a spasm of communal violence in Israel and protests across the West Bank last week.
Muhammad Barakeh, one of the organizers of the strike, said the Palestinians are expressing a “collective position” against Israel’s “aggression” in Gaza and Jerusalem, as well as the “brutal repression” by police across Israel. Israel accuses Hamas of the war and accuses it of instigating violence across the region.
Since the fighting between Israel and Hamas rulers in the Gaza Strip began last week, the Israeli military has launched hundreds of air strikes on Hamas’ militant infrastructure, while Palestinian militants have fired more than 3,400 rockets from civilian areas in the Gaza Strip at civilian targets in Israel to have.
The latest attack from Gaza hit a packaging plant in a region bordering the territory. In addition to the two people killed, who were in their thirties, Israeli ambulance service Magen David Adom said he had taken another seven wounded to hospital. Thai Foreign Ministry spokesman Tanee Sangrat said the wounded were also Thai.
The Israeli military said militants also fired rockets at the Erez pedestrian crossing and the Kerem-Shalom crossing, where humanitarian aid was being brought into Gaza, forcing both to close. It was said that a soldier was slightly wounded in the attack on Erez.
An apartment is damaged after being hit by a rocket from the Gaza Strip in Ashdod, southern Israel. (AP)
Israel continued its air strikes on Gaza, leaving a massive mound of rebar and concrete slabs when it attacked the six-story building with centers used by the Islamic University and other colleges. Desks, office chairs, books, and computer cables could be seen in the rubble. The residents searched the rubble and looked for their belongings.
Israel warned residents of the building in advance and sent them into the pre-dawn darkness, and there were no reports of casualties.
“The whole street started running, then destruction, an earthquake,” said Jamal Herzallah, a local resident. “This whole area was shaking.”
Hamed al-Ijla had operated a training center in the building since 2012, teaching thousands of students first aid, hospital management and other skills.
When the war is over, “I’ll pitch a tent across the street and go back to work,” he said.
An Israeli artillery unit fired at targets in the Gaza Strip on the Israeli Gaza border on Tuesday. (AP)
Heavy fighting broke out on May 10 as the militant Hamas rulers in the Gaza Strip fired long-range missiles at Jerusalem to encourage Palestinian protests against Israel’s harsh policing on the grounds of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a sacred hotspot for Jews and Muslims, and the looming threat Support eviction of dozens of Palestinian families by Jewish settlers.
At least 213 Palestinians have been killed in air strikes since then, including 61 children and 36 women, injuring more than 1,440 people, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which does not split the numbers into militants and civilians. Hamas and Islamic Jihad say at least 20 of their fighters were killed in the fighting, while Israel says the number is at least 160.
Twelve people in Israel, including a 5-year-old boy and a soldier, were killed in the ongoing rocket attacks.
The fighting is the most intense since a war between Israel and Hamas in 2014, but efforts to stop it have so far stalled. Egyptian mediators are trying to negotiate a ceasefire, but the US has stopped calling for an immediate halt to hostilities and Israel has so far vowed to continue.
A Palestinian inspects the damage to a six-story building that was destroyed in an early morning Israeli air strike in Gaza City on Tuesday. (AP)
During the war, Israel also experienced an unusual outbreak of violence, with groups of Jewish and Palestinian citizens fighting in the streets and setting vehicles and buildings on fire.
As the fighting continues, medical supplies, fuel and water are running out in Gaza, home to more than 2 million Palestinians and since Hamas took control of rival Palestinian forces in 2007. Almost 47,000 Palestinians have fled their homes.
Israeli attacks have damaged at least 18 hospitals and clinics and completely destroyed one health facility, the World Health Organization said in a new report. Almost half of all essential medicines on the territory have been used up.
Basic supplies and supplies only entered during the fighting, some from Egypt via the Rafah crossing it controls and some from Israel when it briefly opened the territory’s main trade crossing on Tuesday before the attack forced it to close.
WHO said the bombing of key roads, including those leading to the main Shifa hospital, had hampered the movement of ambulances and supply vehicles in Gaza, which was already grappling with a coronavirus outbreak.
Israel has vowed to continue its operations, and the United States has signaled that even if President Joe Biden said he supported one, it would not pressure the two sides to conclude a ceasefire.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the bombing had set Palestinian militants back for many years.
“I am sure that all of our enemies around us will see the price we have raised for aggression against us,” he said in a video released by his office on Tuesday in front of an F-16 fighter at an air base.
The Biden government has so far refused to publicly criticize Israel’s role in the fighting or to send a high-level envoy to the region, and has blocked a proposed UN Security Council statement calling for an end to the crisis.
Among the buildings leveled by Israeli air strikes were the building that housed The Associated Press Gaza office and that of other media outlets.
Netanyahu claimed that Hamas military intelligence was operating in the building. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday that Israel had given the US information about the bombing.
Blinken, speaking from Iceland, declined to characterize the material obtained. Israel has not presented any public evidence to support its claim.
AP President Gary Pruitt reiterated the organization’s call for an independent investigation into the attack.
“As I said, we have no evidence of a Hamas presence in the building, nor have we been warned of such a possible presence prior to the air strike,” he said in a statement. “We don’t know what the Israeli evidence shows and we want to know.”
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