DEIR AL-BALAH (Gaza Strip), Sep 8: Huge numbers of Israelis again poured into the streets to protest the government’s failure to secure the return of remaining hostages in Gaza, while hospital and local authorities said Israeli air raids in the territory killed more than a dozen people overnight into Saturday.
The new protest came a week after one of the largest demonstrations of the war following the discovery of another six dead hostages in Gaza, and after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back against pressure for a cease-fire deal and declared that “no one will preach to me.”
“I think even those who were maybe reluctant to go out, who are not used to protest, who are sad but prefer to be in private space within their sadness, understood our voice must join together to one huge scream: Bring the hostages with a deal. Do not risk their lives,” said one protester in Tel Aviv, Efrat Machikawa, niece of hostage Gadi Moses.
Israel has been under increasing pressure from the United States and other allies to reach a cease-fire deal, but Netanyahu insists on continued Israeli control of the Philadelphi corridor, a narrow band along Gaza’s border with Egypt where Israel contends Hamas smuggles weapons. Egypt and Hamas deny it.
Israel kept up its military offensive. In central Gaza’s urban refugee camp of Nuseirat, Al-Awda Hospital said it received the bodies of nine people killed in two air raids. One hit a residential building, killing four people and wounding at least 10, while five people were killed in a strike on a house in western Nuseirat.
Separately, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, central Gaza’s main hospital, said a woman and her two children were killed in a strike on a house in the nearby urban refugee camp of Bureij.
In northern Gaza, an airstrike on a school-turned-shelter for displaced people in the town of Jabaliya killed at least four people and wounded about two dozen others, according to Gaza’s Civil Defence authority, which operates under the territory’s Hamas-run government. Israel’s military said it struck a Hamas command post embedded in a former school compound. (AP)