Seven Israeli soldiers killed in Hamas attack in Gaza
Israeli soldiers
have been killed in a
Hamas
attack in the southern
Gaza Strip
, the Israeli military said on Wednesday, one of the deadliest incidents for the force in months.
Meanwhile,
Israeli attacks
have killed 74 people in the Palestinian territory over the previous 24 hours, according to local health authorities on Wednesday.
The seven Israeli soldiers, in the 605th combat engineering battalion, were killed on Tuesday after militants planted a bomb on their vehicle while they were driving in Khan Younis, causing it to catch fire. Hamas later claimed responsibility for the attack.
'Rescue forces and helicopters were dispatched to the scene and made attempts to extract the soldiers but were unsuccessful,' said Brig Gen Effie Defrin, an Israeli army spokesman, on Wednesday. He added that the 605th battalion was finding and demolishing tunnels, as well as killing militants, in Khan Younis.
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Their deaths brought the total number of Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza since October 7th, 2023, to 879.
More than 56,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Gaza by Israel, according to the health ministry, since the October 7th, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, in which militants killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages.
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Gaza's last hospitals battle to save patients amid severe depletion of life-saving medical items
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At least 40 Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza were shot by Israeli forces on Tuesday, local medics and officials said.
The incident comes as Israel ends its war with Iran,
agreeing to a US-brokered ceasefire
on Tuesday.
Fighting started anew in Gaza in March, when Israel restarted its war after refusing to move to a second phase of a ceasefire, which could have led to a more permanent truce. Since then, negotiations for a second ceasefire have borne little progress, with Hamas insisting on a total end to the war in Gaza – a demand Israel has rejected.
Since March, humanitarian conditions in the beleaguered strip have deteriorated. Famine-like conditions reign after Israel imposed a nearly two-month siege on any humanitarian aid into the country. Unicef warned last week that 60 per cent of water production facilities in Gaza were not functioning and that there was a 50 per cent increase in acute child malnutrition from April to May.
More than 500 people have been shot dead by Israeli forces as they travelled to get food from a new US- and Israel-backed private organisation called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Chaos has reigned as hungry Palestinians have had to walk miles and navigate the complicated rules that the GHF and Israel have imposed to access food, with almost daily scenes of Israeli soldiers shooting dozens of people at the sites.
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'We are being slaughtered': Gazans risk their lives on desperate journeys for food
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The GHF has been condemned as potentially being complicit in war crimes, for what aid groups have alleged are its violations of the principles of neutrality and independence, pillars of humanitarian work.
On Wednesday, US president Donald Trump said that US strikes on Iran – which targeted three nuclear facilities – could help lead to a breakthrough on Gaza ceasefire negotiations.
'I think great progress is being made on Gaza. Because of the attack that we made, I think we're going to have some very good news. I think that it helped a little bit, it showed a lot of power,' Mr Trump said at a press conference at a Nato summit in the Netherlands.
On Tuesday, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum released a statement calling for the ceasefire with Iran to be expanded to Gaza.
'We call on the Government to engage in urgent negotiations that will bring home all of the hostages and end the war. Those who can achieve a ceasefire with Iran can also end the war in Gaza,' the forum said in a statement. – Guardian
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Irish Times
4 hours ago
- Irish Times
An Irish surgeon in Gaza: I have seen tiny bodies ripped apart, children eating grass
'WCNSF'. The unfamiliar acronym scribbled on charts attached to children's hospital beds at the Nasser hospital in Gaza had to be explained to me on my first visit there. Working as a surgeon in University Hospital Waterford , I never had any use for the phrase 'wounded child, no surviving family'. But at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, it quickly became part of my medical vocabulary. By the end of my second stint in Khan Yunis this March, the term had become so common that we had more or less stopped using it, as child after child woke from emergency surgery crying out for the embrace of parents who were no longer there to soothe them. 'WCNSF' had by now become the norm, so much so that those with surviving family were the exception. Dr Morgan McMonagle Famine unfolding in Gaza: 'Children are eating grass and weeds at the side of the road' Listen | 23:23 Four months on, and now back home in Ireland, I still struggle to come to terms with the sheer numbers of children who arrived at our hospital every night. Some perfectly intact but already cold from death. Others still alive but with their tiny bodies ripped apart. READ MORE Starving children with signs of wasting were a common sight, as were the horrific infections that rotted away young limbs. A routine day would include rapidly cutting open small chests and abdomens in an effort to stem the life-threatening bleeding caused by shrapnel. Others arrived to us with burns which would prove impossible to survive. Outside, makeshift graves were dug on the hospital grounds to bury the dead, some using what used to be the children's playground. Yasmine (22) and her malnourished two-months-old daughter Teen await treatment at the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis on July 24th. Photograph: AFP/Getty All around us, Gaza was crumbling under the merciless assault from Israel's sophisticated war machinery. No running water. No flushing toilets. No street lighting. Children playing on the rubble of collapsed houses. Families living inside the ruins of what used to be their home. And everywhere, orphans. Hundreds and thousands of orphans. The pictures of starving infants appearing on our TV screens every night appears to have finally awoken the world from the indifference it had been showing towards the suffering in Gaza. But why only now when the bloody images of children maimed by bombs and machine guns over the past 21 months did not? [ A father in Gaza: Our children are dying as the world watches. We don't want your pity – we want action Opens in new window ] It was clear from what I witnessed in Gaza this spring that people were already at the point of starvation. Children eating grass and weeds at the side of the road among piles of garbage. Families surviving on animal feed, ground down and mixed with measly bits of flour and stale bread, re-baked as a staple diet. A former colleague tells me that he has begun getting his children to lick salt before bed to stave off the hunger pangs in an effort to help them sleep. I know it won't work but how do I tell that to someone whose children are starving in front of him? There will be a stain upon our conscience forever if we don't do everything we can to stop this conflict when we have the chance It is inexplicable that we were not collectively repulsed enough to stop the genocide before now. 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