Tehran Times – As the indiscriminate Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip resumed, news agencies from around the world were scrambling to get the first photos from the war zone.
The only pictures they could get their hands on were those of little girls crying after being treated for injuries as a result of Israeli tank shells as well as women and children shedding tears as they sat near their homes, leveled to the ground by Israeli warplanes.
Other pictures showed injured and traumatized-looking children being carried away from the rubble in Rafah and the destruction of houses in Khan Younis, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
The photos portray the same scenes that Palestinian women and children have endured since October 7. Hamas has blamed the Israeli occupation for violating the truce and effectively neglecting its own captives. The group accused the regime of rejecting all offers to release more hostages. It said “the Zionist occupation” bore responsibility for “resuming war and aggression”.
Following a seven-day pause in the war on Gaza, the Israeli regime is conducting what it had done best since October 7: Bombing civilian sites with powerful and indiscriminate force, killing women and children while flattening residential zones to the ground.
A spokesman for the Palestinian health ministry said the occupation regime was committing new massacres in the Gaza Strip immediately after the end of the truce.
The Gaza government media office said the international community, led by the United States, bears responsibility for the Israeli crimes after giving it the green light to continue the war without showing any regard to the laws of war and international and humanitarian laws.
Experts believe the Israeli occupation would not have been allowed to resume its devastating attacks against Gaza without a “greenlight” from Washington. The same greenlight with which the United States allowed the regime to start the war on the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli regime resumed its aggression on the besieged Gaza Strip while U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken was still in Israel. Blinken, whose boasting of his Jewish heritage enraged several regional leaders in the first days of Israeli aggression, stated that Washington is backing Tel Aviv’s war on Gaza.
One day after the war on Gaza began, U.S. President Joe Biden was in Tel Aviv encouraging the Zionist regime to wage war on the tiny coastal enclave.
“I am a Zionist,” Biden proudly declared in Tel Aviv, pledging his unwavering support for the Israeli war on Palestinian women and children.
The American and Zionist politicians and generals who had gathered in a Tel Aviv hotel nodded in approval, as Israeli bombs were “mowing the grass” against civilian sites in the Gaza Strip.
Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator who served six secretaries of state in both Democratic and Republican administrations, pointed out that “Biden’s connection to (the Israeli occupation) is deeply engrained in his political DNA.”
The Gaza government office added that the Palestinian people have the right to defend themselves by all means to achieve their freedom and independence.
As reports surfaced that the Israeli occupation had violated the ceasefire by bombing Gaza, there were instant reports of dozens of civilians killed. Within hours, that number changed to scores of civilians, and throughout the day, the figure increased.
The Palestinian health ministry has said 40 percent of the more than 15,000 people that the Israeli army has killed in Gaza were children (more than 6,000). It is a death toll that seems acceptable to the regime’s staunchest ally, the United States.
Qatar, which played a pivotal role in the temporary truce between the Israeli occupation and Hamas, said mediation efforts to extend the seven-day ceasefire had been complicated by the Israeli bombing of Gaza.
The Qatari foreign ministry called on the international community “to move quickly to stop the violence” and the “humanitarian catastrophe. Qatar expresses its deep regret at the resumption of the Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip following the end of the humanitarian pause, without reaching an agreement to extend it,” it said.
The ministry added it was committed, along with other parties, to continue efforts to return the calm, and condemned “all forms of targeting civilians, the practice of collective punishment, and attempts to forcibly displace citizens of the besieged Gaza Strip”.
The resumption of airstrikes has reportedly killed a number of ambulance crew near al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City.
The occupation regime also launched raids near the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza, and artillery shells fell on the roof of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip.
One Israeli missile struck 50 meters from the biggest functioning hospital in the territory, according to James Elder, a UNICEF spokesperson who was inside the building.
In a post on social media, Elder said, “The health system here is overwhelmed. This hospital simply cannot take more children with the wounds of war.”
“We cannot see more children… with the burns, with the shrapnel littering their body, with the broken bones. Inaction by those with influence is allowing the killing of children. This is a war on children.”
The UN’s children’s agency, UNICEF, has called the failure to halt the war on Gaza “an approval of the killing of children”.
The Israeli Air Force has dropped leaflets in the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis ordering its residents to leave the now very densely populated area and travel to so-called shelters in the Rafah area.
“We have warned you,” the leaflets said with total disregard to the rules of war that forbid the practice of forcibly displacing people.
The Israeli military had already forcibly transferred the residents of northern Gaza to the south, warning them that they would only find a safe haven there.
It is now doing the same to the residents of the south, warning them to move (under heavy bombardment) to the border with Egypt.
In the previous warnings and the current one, the Israeli air force bombed the north and the south.
11 Palestinian civilians, including five children, have been reportedly killed after Israeli bombs landed near Rafah, where the regime has now ordered Palestinians to travel towards.
UN bodies have warned it is impossible for Gaza’s 2.3 million population to seek alleged shelter at small areas in what is already the most densely populated territory on the planet.
As the cruel regime continued its aggression against the civilians on Friday, reports suggested Israeli warplanes had launched a series of raids on south of the Strip.
The regime also attacked the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City, bombed areas northwest of Gaza City and the Jabalia refugee camp.
Israeli war planes targeted the al-Taqwa Mosque in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood. Among other sites, Israeli missiles also landed north of Nuseirat in central Gaza.
Palestinian media reported that the Israeli raids killed Abdullah Darwish?, a photojournalist, thereby bringing to 71 the number of journalists killed in any combat zone around the world in history.
The truce entered into force on November 24 last month and began for a period of four days. It was extended twice, first for two days and then for one day.
Despite Qatari efforts, the Israeli bombings with the backing of the Biden administration have made it impossible for the week-old truce to be extended for a third time.
The United Nations has described the development as “catastrophic”. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “I deeply regret that military operations have started again in Gaza”.
During the temporary truce, seven rounds of exchanges, which involved Israeli captives and Palestinian prisoners, took place between the resistance in Gaza and the Israeli occupation.
As part of the terms of the truce, which stipulates the release of three Palestinian prisoners from the Israeli prisons in exchange for every Israeli captive held by the Hamas resistance movement and the entry of critically needed humanitarian aid into Gaza, there was an option to extend the ceasefire.
According to Egyptian security and aid sources, humanitarian supplies and fuel intended for Gaza has been stopped at the Rafah crossing.
by Ali Karbalaei
