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“HUMAN SHIELDS”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in response to Macron’s comments that Hamas, not Israel, was to blame for the civilian deaths.
Netanyahu repeated that Israel was trying to avoid harming civilians but that Hamas was preventing them from moving to safe areas and using them as “human shields” – a charge Hamas denies.
Israel’s defence force said its 401st Brigade had killed about 150 “terrorists” and gained control over Hamas strongholds in northern Gaza.
Palestinians reported strikes or sniper fire at two hospitals and a school in Gaza on Friday.
The bodies of 50 people killed in a strike on Gaza City’s Al-Buraq school were taken to the Al-Shifa hospital, its director said.
The toll could not be independently verified, though AFP journalists saw corpses covered by blankets lying in the hospital courtyard.
“ON ITS KNEES”
After five weeks of conflict, the Gazan health system was “on its knees”, the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told the UN Security Council.
The International Committee of the Red Cross echoed his comments: “Overstretched, running on thin supplies and increasingly unsafe, the healthcare system in Gaza has reached a point of no return.”
Fighting has reduced some streets in the city to ruins, AFP correspondents there said, describing the sound of heavy gunfire, explosions and the buzz of Israeli military drones as night fell.
In Israel, medical services reported two women were wounded in rocket attacks in Tel Aviv.
Hamas’s military wing said it had targeted the Israeli commercial hub.
Tens of thousands of people have fled to the south of Gaza in recent days, often on foot and taking only the things they could carry.
Almost 1.6 million people have been internally displaced since Oct 7, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said – nearly two thirds of Gaza’s population.
WAR EXPANSION RISK
But the UN estimates tens of thousands of civilians remain in the fiercest battle zones in the north.
Complicating Israel’s military push is the fate of the hostages abducted on Oct 7.
Four hostages have been freed so far by Hamas and another rescued in an Israeli operation. The desperate relatives of those still held in Gaza have piled pressure on Israeli and US authorities to secure the release of their loved ones.
The conflict has also stoked regional tensions, with cross-border exchanges between the Israeli army and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said the expansion of the Israel-Hamas war had become “inevitable”.
Saudi Arabia is hosting Arab leaders and Iran’s president for a summit this weekend in emergency meetings of the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
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