At least 87 people have been killed or missing so far as a result of unremitting Israeli airstrikes against multiple residential buildings in the city of Beit Lahia in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
Dozens of others have also been wounded as a result of the attacks overnight and into Sunday, Gaza’s Media Office said in a statement.
“The toll is expected to rise even further due to the exhaustion of any medical resources in northern Gaza, the shutting down of hospitals after multiple Israeli attacks, the targeting of paramedics and shelters, and the suffocating the siege,” the statement added.
According to the office, the Israeli military began striking the structure, where families had taken refuge under the presumption of its being safe, with no prior warning.
The atrocities are taking place as part of the Israeli regime’s war of genocide against Gaza that has claimed the lives of at least 42,519 Palestinians and wounded 99,637 others since Last October. Women and children comprise the majority of the victims.
The Israeli military is, meanwhile, engaged in “preventing any documentation of the massacre amid a deafening international silence,” the office added.
Also on Saturday, the Gaza-based resistance movement Hamas’ senior spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri held a press conference, saying that the military had been waging a barbaric bombing campaign against northern Gaza that was targeting more than 200,000 Palestinian people there over the past five days.
The campaign that was especially focused on the city of Jabalia and its surroundings, was aimed at implementing the “evil plans of the regime’s generals to displace our people, and commit genocide through the intensified bombing of residential neighborhoods and refugee tents in schools,” he said.
As part of the campaign, Israeli forces “are planting bombs inside buildings and detonating them remotely, preventing fuel from reaching hospitals, blocking food and medical supplies, cutting off communications and the internet, and besieging and bombing hospitals,” the official added.
Zuhri considered the communication and internet blackout that was being imposed by the Israeli military to be aimed at covering up the regime’s genocide and preventing the real picture of “the daily massacre and holocaust it is executing there” from being transmitted to the world.
He denounced what was transpiring in northern Gaza at the hands of Israeli forces as “complete genocide and execution of the people of our nation living there, in blatant violation of international humanitarian law and all international treaties and conventions.”
Zuhri also rebuffed the regime’s allegations of existence of safe areas or corridors, to which Gazans could flee from the ongoing attacks.
“There is no safe place under its (the regime’s) escalation of all forms of barbaric bombardment. This fascist occupation targets by execution or arrest anyone who leaves the north for the areas and corridors it has designated as safe.”
The spokesman, meanwhile, considered the United States and the regime’s other Western allies, most prominently the UK and Germany, to be fully responsible for the consequences of the genocide due to their provision of weapons to the Israeli military and their granting it political cover.
He, however, asserted that the Palestinian people continued to rely on resistance as their only option and kept confronting the aggression and thwart its plans for displacement and liquidation of the Palestinian cause.
Such steadfastness, he added, would last until Palestine’s complete liberation from the shackles of occupation.