GAZA: The death toll in Gaza now exceeds 10,000 after nearly one month of Zionist bombardment, the health ministry said Monday as the offensive against the Palestinian militant group showed signs of intensifying. Determined to destroy Hamas whose Oct 7 attack left 1,400 dead in the Zionist entity and saw over 240 hostages taken, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed no letup despite mounting international calls for a ceasefire.
The Kuwaiti foreign ministry on Sunday voiced emphatic condemnation of remarks made by a Zionist occupation minister regarding dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip. Undoubtedly, these remarks prove that the Zionist occupation and its aggression on the Palestinian people and civilians have reached a serious stage, and its arrogance has reached unprecedented brutality, the ministry said in a press release. It echoed Kuwait’s appeal to the international community and the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to halt genocides against the Palestinian people.
Hundreds of overnight strikes pushed the death toll to 10,022, mostly women and children, a spokesman for the Gaza health ministry told a press conference on Monday afternoon. Two pediatric hospitals and Gaza’s only psychiatric hospital were hit, the ministry said, after the director of another hospital, the Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, reported he had counted 58 dead.
"These are massacres! They destroyed three houses over the heads of their inhabitants — women and children,” one resident, Mahmud Meshmesh, told AFP. "We have already taken 40 bodies out of the rubble,” he said as crowds prayed around corpses wrapped in white shrouds.
Jordan’s air force airdropped vital medical supplies to a field hospital in the besieged Gaza Strip, King Abdullah II said early Monday. "Our fearless air force personnel air-dropped at midnight urgent medical aid to the Jordanian field hospital in Gaza,” he said on X, formerly Twitter. "This is our duty to aid our brothers and sisters injured in the war on Gaza,” he said, adding: "We will always be there for our Palestinian brethren.”
Ground forces with tanks have flooded the northern half of the Gaza Strip and tightened an encirclement of Gaza City, effectively splitting the territory in two, even as hundreds of thousands of civilians remained in the north despite Zionist evacuation orders.
The Zionist entity’s ally the United States sent its top diplomat Antony Blinken on a whirlwind Middle East tour that wrapped up on Monday in Turkey, where again his host pressed for a Zionist ceasefire, which Washington has declined to endorse.
The heads of major United Nations agencies issued a joint statement also calling for a ceasefire inside the territory of 2.4 million people where a Zionist siege has cut off most water, food and fuel supplies. "For almost a month, the world has been watching the unfolding situation in (the Zionist entity) and the Occupied Palestinian Territory in shock and horror at the spiraling numbers of lives lost and torn apart,” said the statement. "We need an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. It’s been 30 days. Enough is enough. This must stop now.”
The Zionist army said on Monday it had pounded Gaza with "significant” new strikes on 450 targets, having earlier said it had already hit over 12,000. It also reported seizing a Hamas command post in central Gaza, where tanks were driving between the ruins of buildings. Zionist troops and Hamas fighters have engaged in fierce house-to-house combat in densely populated north Gaza, where the war has sent 1.5 million people fleeing to other parts of the territory.
Shortly before the latest barrage of strikes, Internet and telephone lines were cut, the army said. The Zionist entity has air-dropped leaflets and sent text messages ordering Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza to head south, but a US official said Saturday at least 350,000 civilians remained in the worst-hit areas.
The Rafah crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt reopened Monday to allow the evacuation of foreigners and dual nationals, the Hamas government said, ending a two-day closure prompted by a dispute over the passage of ambulances. Six ambulances carrying wounded Gazans also arrived in Egypt on Monday as the evacuations resumed, a border official said.
Blinken on his regional tour — which took him to the Zionist entity, Jordan, the occupied West Bank, Cyprus, Iraq and Turkey — called for "humanitarian pauses” while rejecting Arab countries’ demands for a ceasefire. In Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohamed Shia Al-Sudani met Blinken, the premier’s office said. Blinken’s visit — which came after a brief stop in Cyprus to discuss a possible maritime aid route to Gaza — was not announced in advance for security reasons. Since the start of the Zionist-Hamas war, a series of rocket and drone attacks have targeted military bases hosting US forces in Iraq.
During his meeting with Blinken, Sudani reiterated calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and pointed to "the urgency of containing the crisis and preventing its spread”, a statement from his office said. On Sunday evening, thousands of supporters of influential Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr gathered in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, brandishing Iraqi and Palestinian flags. Some burned Zionist and US flags during the demonstration, which followed a call from Sadr’s movement on X, formerly Twitter, to "protest peacefully” against Blinken’s visit.
After meeting his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan in Ankara on Monday, Blinken said Washington was working "very aggressively” to dramatically expand aid reaching trapped civilians in Gaza, but he did not provide details before boarding a flight to Japan. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself was travelling across his country’s remote northeast on Monday, apparently snubbing Blinken.
The war has exacerbated tensions in the West Bank, where more than 150 Palestinians have been killed in clashes with Zionist forces and settlers since it started, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Zionist forces killed four Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Monday, the Palestinian health ministry reported. Three Palestinians were killed and a fourth injured by Zionist army fire in Tulkarem. Earlier, the Palestinian health ministry said Zionist forces killed a young Palestinian man and seriously injured three others in the town of Halhul.
In Zionist-annexed east Jerusalem, a 20-year-old female Zionist border police officer died after a knife-wielding Palestinian assailant stabbed her in front of a police station, the force said. "Border police forces neutralized the terrorist by shooting,” a statement said. – Agencies