GAZA: Zionist forces pounded central Gaza anew on Sunday, a day after killing 274 Palestinians during a captive rescue raid, and tanks advanced further into Rafah in an apparent bid to seal off part of the southern city, residents and Hamas media said. Palestinians remained in shock over Saturday’s death toll, the worst over a 24-hour period of the Gaza war for months and including many women and children, Palestinian medics said.

In an update on Sunday, Gaza’s health ministry said 274 Palestinians were killed - up from 210 it reported on Saturday – and 698 were injured when Zionist commandos stormed into the densely populated Al-Nuseirat camp to rescue four captives held since October by Hamas fighters. Sixty-four of the dead were children and 57 were women, the Gaza government media office said on Sunday.

Kuwait strongly condemned and denounced the Zionist occupation assault on Al-Nuseirat camp. According to a statement by the foreign ministry, Kuwait deemed this act as a violation of international and humanitarian laws. Kuwait reiterated its condemnation of this heinous criminal act and called on the international community and the UN Security Council to halt the barbaric aggression on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip that killed, so far, over 37,000 unarmed civilians. Kuwait also called for enabling the delivery of much-needed humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people.

A key member of the Zionist entity’s war cabinet quit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on Sunday, heaping domestic pressure on the Zionist leader. Benny Gantz, a former general and defense minister, announced his resignation from the emergency body after failing to get a post-war plan for Gaza approved by Netanyahu, which he demanded in May. “Netanyahu is preventing us from progressing to a real victory. That is why we are leaving the emergency government today with a heavy heart,” Gantz said. The Zionist premier responded within minutes, saying: “Benny, this is not the time to abandon the battle — this is the time to join forces.”

Hamas armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said on Sunday three Zionist hostages, including one with US citizenship, were killed during the raid, but provided no names. It released a video of corpses with censor bars obscuring their faces. A Hamas assertion on Saturday that some hostages had died was rejected as “a blatant lie” by the Zionist military. Hamas’ armed wing also warned that conditions would worsen for the remaining captives. “The operation will pose a great danger (for) the enemy’s prisoners and will have a negative impact on their conditions,” spokesman Abu Obaida wrote on the Telegram channel.

Gaza’s health ministry said 698 Palestinians were injured in the Zionist raid, and one of them, 4-year-old Tawfiq Abu Youssef, was in critical condition when visited in hospital on Sunday by his father Raed. The boy was first thought to have died before he moved his hand slightly while in the arms of a relative rushing him to hospital - captured in a video that went viral on social media. “I had already dug his grave,” his father told Reuters, adding that most members of his extended family were among those killed in the raid.

In central Gaza on Sunday, Zionist airstrikes on houses in the city of Deir Al-Balah and in the nearby Al-Bureij refugee camp killed three Palestinians in each location, while tanks shelled parts of Al-Nuseirat and Al-Maghazi camps, medics said. The Zionist entity sent forces into Rafah in May in what it called a mission to wipe out Hamas’ last intact combat units after eight months of war, in which Zionist forces have bombed much of the rest of Gaza to rubble while advancing against fierce resistance from militants embedded in crowded cities and built-up camps.

Zionist tank forces have since seized Gaza’s entire border strip with Egypt running through Rafah to the Mediterranean coast and invaded many districts of the city of 280,000 residents, prompting around one million displaced people who had been sheltering in Rafah to flee elsewhere. On Sunday, tanks advanced into two new districts in an apparent effort to complete the encirclement of the entire eastern side of Rafah, touching off clashes with dug-in Hamas-led armed groups, according to residents trapped in their homes.

Palestinian medics said a Zionist airstrike on a house in Tel Al-Sultan in western Rafah killed two people. The Zionist air and ground war in Gaza has killed at least 37,084 Palestinians, mostly women and children, the health ministry in the territory said in its Sunday update. The ministry says thousands more dead are feared buried under the rubble. – Agencies