Northern Gaza’s Qassam Brigades attack five Israeli combat tanks

In the northern part of the Gaza Strip, the military wing of the Hamas resistance movement says it attacked five Israeli battle tanks. Israeli airstrikes killed dozens more people in the encircled area.

The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades said in a short statement that its soldiers used an explosive device to attack a Merkava tank in the al-Saftawi area, which is west of the Jabalia refugee camp.

In a second statement, the group said that its members had used explosives to attack four more tanks in the eastern part of Jabalia town.

In later news, the al-Qassam Brigades said that its forces had fired a SAM rocket at an Israeli Apache helicopter in the east of the al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. The Israeli army hasn’t said anything about what Hamas said yet.

 

The number of resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip has been called into question by Israeli media in recent days, which say they have made a “substantial comeback” 15 months into the bloody war on the Palestinian territory.

 

The Jerusalem Post and other Israeli news sites say that there are between 20,000 and 23,000 resistance fighters in Gaza. These are local fighters as well as fighters from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.

 

The Post said on Thursday that Hamas is “making a substantial comeback by recruiting new forces.” The new numbers call into question Israel’s claims that they are getting closer and closer to a complete win over Hamas.

The Israeli military reported that the Gaza Strip fired three rockets on Friday. Palestinian resistance forces launched the most recent rockets in severely damaged areas.

Israel has been at war with Gaza for more than 14 months, and these kinds of attacks are still happening. These attacks have intensified since late December as part of Israel’s three-month major land and air offensive in the north of the region.

Israel said earlier Friday that another rocket fired from Gaza had set off sirens near Beeri, which is across the border from central Gaza.

According to another news source in Gaza, Israeli attacks on Friday claimed 30 lives.

According to Mahmud Bassal, a spokeswoman for the civil defense, “Friday was a hard day for the people of Gaza, especially in Gaza City, because Israel kept bombing them.”

He said that some of the dead were children.

 

Bashal said that an Israeli attack in the Shuja’iyya area of Gaza City killed seven people.

“They killed all the living things on Earth, even the trees. What about people?” This is a fight to kill everyone, said Mohammed Abu Labda, who lives in Gaza and whose brother was killed.

 

Bassal said that the Israeli force is “keeping dozens of medical staff, patients, and wounded from getting food and water” at the Indonesian Hospital in the town of Beit Lahia in the north.

 

As of Thursday, he said, the hospital had been sending out alarm calls. The building was now “just a pile of rubble and walls.” There’s no hospital.

On Sunday, a group from the UN went to the Indonesian hospital.

In a video made public after the visit, UN help worker Jonathan Whittall said, “Around me, there’s nothing but rubble and destruction.”

 

At the same time, Hamas said that informal talks for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip would start up again later in Qatar.

Mediators A representative from the Tel Aviv government and a representative from Hamas have been in back-and-forth talks with Qatar, Egypt, and the US for months now. These talks have not ended the 15-month Israeli war.

One big problem with making a deal has been that Israel doesn’t want to agree to a long-term truce.