Israel suffers heaviest losses since Gaza war

Fierce fighting is raging in both northern and southern Gaza, a day after the United Nations called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. US President Joe Biden said Israel's "indiscriminate" bombing of civilians was losing international support.

Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. Photo: Reuters

10 soldiers killed in ambush

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military would continue fighting despite international pressure for a ceasefire. “We will continue until the end, until victory, until Hamas is destroyed. I say this with great pain and with international pressure. Nothing can stop us,” he told soldiers in Gaza over the radio.

Israel said 10 of its soldiers were killed in the past 24 hours, including a colonel commanding a forward base and a lieutenant colonel commanding a regiment. It was Israel’s worst single-day loss since 15 soldiers were killed on October 31.

The Israeli military said most of the deaths occurred in the Shejaia district of northern Gaza City, where its troops were ambushed while trying to rescue another group of soldiers who had attacked Hamas militants in a building. An Israeli military official said they had paid a “heavy price” for the incident.

Hamas has released a video saying Israeli forces can never subdue Gaza. In a televised speech, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said any future deal in Gaza without Hamas was an "illusion".

Israel won some sympathy from some countries when it launched a campaign to destroy Hamas after the Palestinian militant group stormed the border fence on October 7, killing 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and taking 240 hostages.

But since then, Israel has laid siege to Gaza and devastated much of the area. Gaza's health authority said on Wednesday that at least 18,608 people have been killed and 50,594 injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. Thousands more may be missing in the rubble.

The ultimate pain of innocent people

Warplanes are again bombing the Gaza Strip and aid officials say the arrival of winter rains has worsened living conditions for hundreds of thousands of people sleeping outdoors in makeshift tents. Many of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been left homeless.

In Rafah, south of Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter, the bodies of a family killed in an overnight airstrike lay in the rain in blood-soaked white shrouds, including several young children. One infant was wrapped in a pink blanket.

An injured child is taken to a hospital in the southern Gaza city of Rafah on December 13, 2023. Photo: AP

Ahmed Abu Reyash collected the bodies of his nieces, aged 5 and 7. As he carried one girl across the street, a relative tugged at her shroud and shouted: “These are children! Children! Did they kill anyone but children? No! These are innocent people!”

In a tent camp in Rafah, Yasmin Mhani said she woke up in the night to find her youngest child, a seven-month-old, soaked from the rain. Her family of five had to share a blanket after their home was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike. One child was killed and they lost all their possessions.

“This is the fifth place we've had to move to, running from place to place, with nothing but the T-shirts on our backs,” she said, hanging her wet clothes outside her tent.

Since the collapse of a week-long ceasefire in early December, Israeli forces have expanded their ground campaign from north to south in the Gaza Strip. Hospitals in the north have largely ceased to function. In southern Gaza, hospitals are overwhelmed by the dead and wounded.

Bui Huy (according to Reuters, CNN, AP)

Source: https://www.congluan.vn/israel-chiu-ton-that-va-bi-co-lap-nhieu-hon-trong-chien-su-o-gaza-post276452.html