The Israeli army announced on Thursday that it had attacked 300 targets in the Gaza Strip during 2020.
The army revealed in a statement documenting its activities in 2020, that nearly 300 targets were raided in the Gaza Strip, while its armed forces thwarted 38 attempts to infiltrate through the security fence of the besieged enclave. According to the statement, as many as: “176 rockets and mortars were launched from the Gaza Strip, 90 per cent of them landed in empty areas, as the Iron Dome system intercepted 80 shells and rockets that were targeting civilian areas.”
In the occupied West Bank, the Israeli army stole 675,000 shekels of Palestinians’ money, compared with 972,000 shekels in 2019. More than one million shekels were stolen in 2018, and 541 weapons confiscated, compared with 603 during the previous year. As stated in the report, Israeli combat aircraft carried out 1,400 sorties on various fronts, while the spy drones recorded 35,000 flight hours.
No let off
This comes in a year where Covid-19 took over the world. For several years, health and humanitarian experts have warned that Israel’s blockade of the Strip, now in its 13th year, have left the health sector close to collapsing and unable to deal with a pandemic. As the world’s most densely populated area in the world, an outbreak of Covid-19 only seems inevitable as a result of the Israeli blockade.
Chronic shortage of medicine and health equipment have left hospitals and doctors unable to deal with a severe crisis, let alone a pandemic. There are currently 62 respirators, 70 intensive care beds and 2,895 beds in the Gaza Strip—for a population of over two million. According to Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov, as of June 2020, 39% of the Gaza Strip’s essential medicine was depleted.
