As the Israeli occupation’s all-out assault on the Gaza Strip nears its second year, each day reveals new chapters of a tragedy that has turned the lives of Palestinian civilians into a state of permanent hell, through systematic killing, suffocating siege, destruction of infrastructure, and forced displacement, amounting in every respect to a war of genocide.
Since dawn on Monday, 11 Palestinians have been killed and others wounded in a series of air strikes and artillery bombardments across various areas of the Strip.
In Gaza City, an air strike targeted a tent sheltering displaced persons on Al-Labbabidi Street (west), killing three members of the Abu Harbeid family, a couple and their child.
In another tragic development, journalist Mohammed al-Khalidi succumbed to wounds sustained on Sunday evening in a strike on a tent near Al-Shifa Hospital, the same attack that killed five other journalists at the time.
Overnight, Israeli occupation forces escalated operations in the eastern and southern neighbourhoods of the city, particularly Al-Zaytoun and Al-Shuja’iyya, through air raids, heavy fire belts, and the demolition of buildings and facilities—a policy aimed at flattening entire districts.
In Khan Younis, seven Palestinians from the Abu Shammala family were killed when a residential apartment in the western camp was hit by a suicide drone.
In the central Strip, a child was killed and four others wounded when Israeli occupation forces targeted a gathering of people waiting for aid near Salah al-Din Street, south of Wadi Gaza, another instance of the policy of striking civilians even as they seek food.
Since 7 October 2023, the Israeli occupation, with U.S. support, has been carrying out a full-scale genocide in Gaza, involving direct killing, starvation, large-scale destruction, and forced displacement, in total disregard of International Court of Justice rulings and UN appeals.
This war has so far killed 61,430 Palestinians and wounded 153,213 others, in addition to more than 9,000 missing and hundreds of thousands displaced, while famine claims the lives of many, including dozens of children.
This pattern of targeting civilians in their homes, means of subsistence, and places of refuge constitutes collective punishment, a blatant violation of international humanitarian law, and amounts to genocide under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, making what is happening in Gaza an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe in modern times, one that demands urgent and decisive action from the international community.
