SUMMARY -Israel bombs Gaza again after Hamas frees two US hostages

SUMMARY -Israel bombs Gaza again after Hamas frees two US hostages

Israel’s intense nighttime bombing of Gaza

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50 people die in bombing of homes: Palestinians

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Hamas freed two US hostages on Friday

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Netanyahu: We will not give up on getting everyone back

By Nidal al-Mughrabi and Emily Rose

GAZA/JERUSALEM, Oct 21 (Reuters) – Israel continued to heavily bomb targets across Gaza overnight on Saturday, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “fight until victory” following the release of the first two hostages by the Hamas group, which governs the enclave.

After Netanyahu signaled that Israel was not going to stop its airstrike or its expected ground invasion, the Israeli military said its warplanes had attacked “a large number of Hamas terrorist targets throughout the Gaza Strip,” including centers command and combat positions inside multi-story buildings.

Palestinian medical officials and Hamas media outlets said Israeli aircraft had attacked several family homes in Gaza, one of the most densely populated places in the world, overnight, killing at least 50 people and wounding dozens.

The Israeli Army reported a new volley of rockets from Gaza against border communities in southern Israel before dawn, and after a truce until sirens sounded in the port city of Ashdod, about 40 kilometers north of the Palestinian enclave.

There was no immediate word of casualties in either incident.

Hamas on Friday freed Americans Judith Tai Raanan, 59, and her daughter Natalie, 17, who were among the 210 kidnapped in the October 7 cross-border attack on southern Israel by militants of the Islamist movement.

An image obtained by Reuters after their release showed the two women flanked by three Israeli soldiers and holding hands with Gal Hirsch, Israeli coordinator for captives and missing persons.

Reached by phone in Bannockburn, Illinois, outside Chicago, Uri Raanan, the teen’s father, said he spoke to his daughter on the phone. She “sounds very, very good, very happy—and she looks good.”

They are the first confirmed hostage releases by both sides in the conflict since Hamas gunmen swept into Israel and killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in the deadliest single attack on Israelis since the country’s founding 75 years ago.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, Israeli retaliation with air and missile strikes has killed at least 4,137 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, while more than a million of the besieged territory’s 2.3 million inhabitants They have been displaced.

Israel has amassed tanks and troops near the fenced border surrounding the small coastal enclave for a planned ground invasion aimed at annihilating Hamas, following several inconclusive wars dating back to its 2007 takeover of Gaza.

The first convoy of emergency humanitarian aid sent to the Gaza Strip since the outbreak of war began moving through the Rafah border crossing from Egypt on Saturday, after days of diplomatic disputes over the conditions for the delivery of aid.

The United Nations said the convoy of 20 trucks included vital supplies that the Palestinian Red Crescent would receive. Hamas said the delivery included medicine and limited amounts of food, but not fuel.

The Israeli military said humanitarian aid entering Gaza will go only to the southern areas of the enclave, where it has urged Palestinian civilians to congregate to avoid fighting with Hamas.

UN officials say at least 100 trucks a day are needed in Gaza to meet urgent needs, and that any aid delivery must be sustained and at scale. Before the outbreak of the conflict, an average of about 450 aid trucks arrived daily in Gaza, which has been under Israeli and Egyptian blockade for years.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres toured the checkpoint on the Egyptian side on Friday and called for a significant number of trucks to enter Gaza each day, and that the checkpoints – which Israel insists on to prevent aid from reaching to Hamas – be quick and pragmatic.

HOSTAGE RELEASE

Netanyahu affirmed late on Friday that Israel will not give up its efforts to “bring back all those kidnapped and missing (…) At the same time, we will continue fighting until victory.”

Abu Ubaida, spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, said the hostages were released partly “for humanitarian reasons” in response to Qatari mediation efforts.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said achieving Israel’s goals would not be quick or easy.

“We will overthrow the Hamas organization. We will destroy its military and government infrastructure. It is a phase that will not be easy. It will have a price,” Gallant told a parliamentary committee.

He added that the next phase would be longer, but that his goal was to achieve “a completely different security situation,” with no threats to Israel from Gaza. “It’s not a day, it’s not a week and, unfortunately, it’s not a month,” he said.

BOMBING OF A CHURCH

The Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the main Palestinian Christian denomination, said Israeli forces had attacked the Church of Saint Porphyry in Gaza City, where hundreds of Christians and Muslims had sought refuge.

The Israeli military said part of the church had been damaged in an attack on a nearby militant command center.

Israel has already ordered all civilians to evacuate the northern half of the Gaza Strip, which includes Gaza City. Many people have not left yet because they fear losing everything and have nowhere safe to go as southern areas are also under attack.

Asked whether Israel had so far followed the laws of war in its retaliation, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated on Friday that Israel had the right to defend itself and ensure that Iran-backed Hamas could not launch again. attacks.

“It is important that operations are carried out in accordance with international law, humanitarian law and the law of war,” he said.

The United Nations humanitarian affairs office said more than 140,000 homes – nearly a third of all those in Gaza – had been damaged and almost 13,000 were completely destroyed.

Until now, Western leaders have largely supported Israel’s campaign against Hamas, although there is growing unrest over the plight of civilians in Gaza.

Many Muslim states, however, have called for an immediate ceasefire, and protests were held in cities across the Islamic world on Friday demanding an end to the bombing.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where violence has escalated since Israel began bombing Gaza, Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian teenager during clashes near the city of Jericho.

Since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out, the border areas between southern Lebanon and northern Israel have also been the scene of constant, although so far limited, clashes between the Israeli army and fighters from the Lebanese Shiite Islamist group Hezbollah.

The Israeli military said Saturday that a soldier had been killed by a missile attack on the Lebanese border, in a statement that gave no details about the exact time or location. (Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza, and Washington and Jerusalem Bureaux; writing by Idrees Ali and Stephen Coates; edited in Spanish by Javier López de Lérida)

Source: Ambito

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