Death toll in Gaza exceeds 850
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The Palestinian death toll in the Gaza Strip has risen to 854 people and more than 3,350 injured as the Israeli offensive enters its third week. Eight members of one family were among the latest fatalities, killed by an Israeli tank shell in Jabalya. “We were at home when the bombing started,” Umm Mohammed, one of the survivors of the attack, said. “We fled towards another house and the tanks started firing. Several of us were hit.” Israel dropped leaflets on Gaza City warning residents that the military was about to “escalate” the offensive and begin a “new phase in the war on terror”. The notices told residents not to approach Hamas members, the group’s fighters or weapons depots. Ayman Mohyeldin, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Gaza City, said there had been a lot of intense fighting. “The most significant development was the advance of the Israeli military,” he said. “We understand now they are on the outskirts of Gaza City, still trying to avoid going in through major population centres, but navigating their way around those urban areas on the periphery.” Gazans ‘locked in’ Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor working at Shifa hospital in Gaza City, told Al Jazeera: “We have been to many war zones, but the special thing is that the 1.5 Gaza population are completely locked in. “The civilian population has no way to hide. The population density is so high you can not do attacks like this without knowing that you are attacking the civilians.
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The attacks continued on Saturday with Israeli aircraft bombarding smuggling tunnels near the Rafah border crossing and ground forces advancing further into the outskirts of Gaza City.
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 1:25 am and is filed under Miscelleneous . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
