While Israel and Hezbollah have agreed to a cease-fire in Lebanon, the war in Gaza seems far from over.
On Tuesday night into Wednesday, as the cease-fire was being finalized, the Israeli military struck dozens of sites in Gaza that it said were Hamas military structures. The Israeli attacks killed least 33 people and injured 134 more in Gaza over the period, according to the Gazan health ministry.
Thirteen deaths came in an Israeli strike on Al-Tabin school in Gaza City, which has been operating as a shelter, according to Palestinian Civil Defense, which runs emergency response in Gaza. Among the dead were six women, the agency said. A Hamas official, Fawzi Barhoum, said on Facebook that two of his sons also died in the strike.
The Israeli military said that it struck sites Hamas used for fighting and storing weapons in northern Gaza, after learning of them in interrogations of militants arrested in the area. The military said it also killed Morad Rajoub, identified as a Hamas militant, in Gaza City.
The cease-fire in Lebanon has left many Gazans feeling frustrated and hopeless. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appears far more reluctant to agree to a truce in Gaza, where Hamas continues to hold roughly 100 hostages, some of them dead. Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to annihilate Hamas in Gaza, but the group has proved resilient, and fighting remains fierce nearly 14 months after the war began.
The result is a humanitarian disaster. More than 44,000 Gazans have died in the war and nearly 105,000 have been injured, according to the Gazan health ministry. The vast majority of the population has been displaced. United Nations officials have warned that hunger and disease are widespread, hospitals are hardly functioning and aid into parts of Gaza has significantly slowed, often restricted by Israeli forces or looted by violent mobs.
Supply shortages have complicated rescue operations. Mahmoud Basal, the spokesman for Palestinian Civil Defense, said that after the strike on Al-Tabin school, the agency’s teams could not send crews and equipment to dig victims out because of a lack of fuel. A donation of fuel allowed rescuers to arrive on Wednesday morning.
“We pulled out who we could,” Mr. Basal said. But three people, he said, would only have been reachable by removing the school’s roof, “and that was impossible.”
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