Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that the fighting in Gaza is far from over and dismissed what he cast as false media speculation that his government might call a halt to fighting against Hamas, Reuters reports.
“We are not stopping. We are continuing to fight, and we will be intensifying the fighting in the coming days, and the fighting will take long and it is not close to concluding,” he told lawmakers from his Likud party, according to a statement.
Gaza’s health ministry has said that 20,674 people have been killed and 54,536 injured in Israeli strikes since October 7.
The ministry added that 250 Palestinians were killed in the past 24 hours and 500 wounded.
At a funeral in Gaza on Monday a line of Palestinians touched white shrouds containing the bodies of at least 70 people who Palestinian health officials said were killed by an Israeli airstrike targeting Maghazi in the centre of the besieged strip.
It came after one of the enclave’s deadliest nights in the 11-week-old battle between Israel and Hamas. One man hugged a dead child and others were hysterical.
“The strikes were at 2. The walls and the curtains fell on us,” said one man. “I reached down to my four-year-old child but all I found were rocks.”
Strikes that began hours before midnight persisted into Monday. Palestinian media said Israel stepped up air and ground shelling in central Gaza with local residents saying they had lived one of their worst nights since the war began.
