Agencies: Sixteen Palestinians were killed in Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip early Saturday, bringing the toll on the fifth day of cross-border fighting to 121, medics said. Israel showed no sign of pausing despite international pressure to negotiate a ceasefire with the militants. The latest strike killed three in the eastern Tufah neighbourhood of Gaza City, Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said. The raid came shortly after two people were killed in a strike that hit a charitable association for the disabled in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, and another three people died in an attack in western Gaza City.
Earlier, Qudra announced the deaths of eight other Palestinians, including a man who died of wounds sustained in an earlier strike, five people killed in Gaza’s northern Jebaliya, and two further south in Deir el Balah. Local officials said the morning’s raids hit targets that included mosques and homes of Hamas officials, throughout the coastal enclave. The latest fatalities raise the death toll to 121 since Israel began Operation Protective Edge early Tuesday in an attempt to halt cross-border rocket fire by militant groups.
Since then, militants have fired approximately 520 mortar rounds and rockets that struck Israel, while another 140 rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defence system, an Israeli army statement said late Friday. Asked if Israel might move from the mostly aerial attacks of the past four days into a ground war in Gaza to stop militant rocket fire, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replied, “We are weighing all possibilities and preparing for all possibilities.”
“No international pressure will prevent us from acting with all power,” he told reporters in Tel Aviv a day after a telephone conversation with US President Barack Obama about the worst flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian violence in almost two years.
On Friday Washington affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself in a statement from the Pentagon. But defence secretary Chuck Hagel told Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya’alon he was concerned “about the risk of further escalation and emphasized the need for all sides to do everything they can to protect civilian lives and restore calm.”
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