JUST IN: AIR STRIKES IN GAZA CRUSH JOY OF CEASEFIRE DEAL
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Agency Report
After news of a ceasefire agreement sparked mass rejoicing in Gaza, residents woke up Thursday to columns of smoke, rubble, and more deaths following new Israeli airstrikes.
“We were waiting for the truce and were happy. It was the happiest night since October 7,” said Gaza resident Saeed Alloush, referring to the Hamas attack on Israel that sparked the war in 2023.
“Suddenly… we received the news of the martyrdom of 40 people,” including his uncle, Alloush said.
“The whole area’s joy turned to sadness, as if an earthquake struck.”
The most recent strikes followed the announcement of a precarious ceasefire agreement between the US and Qatar that is set to go into effect on Sunday.
The Israeli military has been contacted by AFP for comment.
At least 73 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes since the announcement on Wednesday, according to Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for Gaza’s civil defence department, who spoke to AFP on Thursday.
Twenty women and twenty children were among them, he claimed, while almost 200 others were injured.
Crowds arrived at daybreak to examine and remove the ruins of a building that had been reduced to rubble, with pieces of concrete lying spread over the scene along with rebar and personal belongings.
At Nasser Hospital, the main medical facility of the southern city of Khan Yunis, AFP journalists saw stained metal mortuary stretchers stained in red as staff drained them of the blood of the dead in a strike.
In Gaza City’s Al-Ahli hospital, where several strike casualties were taken, grieving families knelt by the white shrouds enveloping their loved ones’ bodies.
Rescuer Ibrahim Abu al-Rish told AFP that “after the ceasefire was announced and people were happy and joyful, a five-storey building was targeted, with more than 50 people inside”.
Wearing headlights, first responders and local residents searched through the rubble late at night in the devastated streets of Gaza City.
Abu al-Rish, an ambulance driver for Gaza’s civil defence agency, said Thursday that “shelling is still continuing, targeting one house after another”.
In the Al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, resident Mahmud al-Qarnawi told AFP that until the agreement takes hold, Gazans would remain vulnerable.
“The shooting has not stopped, the planes are still in the air and the situation is difficult,” he said.
As a result, Qarnawi and others AFP spoke to in the nearby city of Nuseirat said they were worried about what could happen next.
“We must remain cautious. And for the next three days, we are afraid of a (possible) bloodbath (worse) than before,” Motaz Bakeer, a displaced Gazan, said from the market at Nuseirat.
International medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said no one could yet feel safe in Gaza.
“Last night it was a lot of cheering for 20 minutes, and then it was a very bloody night,” MSF’s emergency coordinator Amande Bazerolle told AFP by phone from the territory, rounds of shelling audible in the background.
The Israeli cabinet is expected to approve the Gaza deal later Thursday, though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office accused Hamas of backtracking on elements of the agreement.
Key mediators Qatar and the United States said Wednesday that Israel and Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza starting on Sunday, along with a hostage and prisoner exchange.
If the fragile agreement is approved, 33 hostages should be released in a first phase, Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani said.
The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s attack, which resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive in Gaza has killed 46,788 people, the majority civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory considered reliable by the United Nations.
AFP
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