Israeli forces pushed on with intense strikes targeting Hamas in Gaza on Monday as the war neared one month and the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll approached 10,000 inside the besieged territory.
Determined to destroy Hamas whose October 7 attack left 1,400 dead in Israel and saw over 240 hostages taken.
Ground forces have flooded the northern half of the Gaza Strip and tightened an encirclement of Gaza City even as hundreds of thousands of civilians remain there despite Israeli evacuation orders.
Israel’s army said Monday it had pounded Gaza with “significant” new strikes, having earlier said it had already hit over 12,000 targets.
“We will take the fight to Hamas wherever they are — underground, above ground,” Israeli army spokesman Jonathan Conricus said, repeating calls for civilians to leave the urban war zone.
Blinken in Turkey
Blinken on his regional tour — which took him to the occupied West Bank, Cyprus and Iraq on Sunday — has called for “humanitarian pauses” while rejecting Arab countries’ demands for a ceasefire.
He met his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan in Ankara on Monday.
Ahead of Blinken’s arrival in NATO member Turkey, which is allied to the Palestinians but also has ties with Israel, police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse hundreds of protesters who marched on an air base housing US forces in Turkey’s southeast.
Meeting with Blinken in the West Bank on Sunday, Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas denounced “the genocide and destruction suffered by our Palestinian people in Gaza at the hands of Israel’s war machine”.
