JERUSALEM: The Zionist entity’s military intelligence chief has resigned after taking responsibility for failures leading to the Hamas attack on Oct 7, the military said on Monday, as the Zionist entity carried out more shelling in war-battered Gaza. Major General Aharon Haliva is the first top Zionist official to step down for failing to prevent the Hamas attack, which triggered the Gaza war now in its seventh month, and brought intense scrutiny to the Zionist entity’s government and military.

The Zionist entity also lashed out at reports that its top ally and military supplier the United States was considering sanctioning the Zionist military’s ultra-Orthodox Netzah Yehuda battalion over human rights abuses in the West Bank from before the war. Gaza’s Civil Defence agency said Monday that health workers had uncovered around 200 bodies over the past three days of people killed and buried by Zionist forces at a hospital in Khan Yunis.

“Our civil defence crews are still recovering bodies from inside Nasser Medical Complex, and since Saturday bodies of nearly 200 martyrs have been retrieved,” Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defence, told AFP. Bassal said several of the recovered bodies had decomposed. “There is difficulty in the process of identifying them but civil defence efforts are ongoing,” he said.Continued on Page 6Ismail Al-Thawabta, head of the Hamas government media office in the Palestinian territory, gave a higher figure of 283 bodies found at the hospital.

“We discovered mass graves inside Nasser Medical Complex” of people killed by “the occupation (Zionist) army”, Thawabta told AFP. The Zionist military said it was checking the reports, which come after the World Health Organization in early April said Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City had been reduced to ashes by a Zionist siege, leaving an “empty shell” containing many bodies.Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said late Sunday that the Zionist military would increase military pressure to “deliver additional and painful blows” on the Hamas Palestinian fighters it is fighting in Gaza.

The prime minister has for two months talked of sending troops into Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah to go after Hamas there. The Zionist entity’s allies including Washington have warned against such an operation, fearing a worsening of Gaza’s already catastrophic humanitarian situation. A majority of Palestinians in Gaza have sought refuge in Rafah from elsewhere in the territory.The announcement of further military pressure came amid growing global opposition to the Zionist entity’s Gaza offensive which has turned vast areas into rubble and sparked fears of famine.

Gaza was hit by heavy shelling overnight Sunday-Monday, with strikes reported in several areas in the centre and south of the territory, an AFP correspondent said Monday.Doctors at Al-Aqsa Hospital in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah told AFP that six people were wounded in a Zionist air strike. A mosque in the nearby Al-Bureij refugee camp was destroyed in a strike, with footage from the scene showing multiple levels of the building collapsed in front of a still-standing minaret. “At 1:15 am, all of a sudden we saw fire, debris and destruction all around us,” camp resident Mohammed Musaad told AFP.

“We started running and found the mosque destroyed.”Also in Deir al-Balah, Palestinians made a tent out of a parachute used to air-drop aid off the coast. “When the parachute fell into the sea, we brought it in a small boat,” said Naeem al-Goaan. His sister sleeps in the tent at night, while they use it as a store during the day, he added. Gaza’s crossings and borders authority said 34 Palestinian detainees had been released from Zionist prisons since Monday morning. Authority spokesman Hisham Adwan said some of the prisoners showed “signs of torture”.

Zionist soldiers have rounded up hundreds of Gazans during the war against Hamas, holding them without charge before releasing some in groups.In the occupied West Bank, where violence has surged alongside the Gaza war, a funeral procession was held on Sunday for 13 Palestinians killed during a Zionist raid on Nur Shams refugee camp. The Zionist entity’s offensive has killed at least 34,151 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the territory’s health ministry. – Agencies