Israeli strikes kill over 100 in Gaza amid Trump’s tour of region
Thursday has been another bloody day for Gaza residents as the Israeli military pressed ahead with its unrelenting attacks across the blockaded territory.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump on Thursday doubled down on his controversial scheme to displace Palestinians from their homeland.
Palestinian rescuers reported Israeli strikes across the besieged region had killed at least 103 people, the majority of them children and women, since early morning Thursday.
The fatalities came after airstrikes and shelling targeted several areas across the besieged territory, including the cities of Beit Lahia, Khan Younis and Jabalia.
The latest fatalities include Palestinian journalist Hassan Samour and his family. This brings 216 the number of journalists killed in Gaza since October 2023.
Residents and witnesses reported “intense Israeli shelling all night.”
“Tank shells are striking around the clock, and the area is packed with people and tents,” Amir Selha, a 43-year-old Palestinian from north Gaza, was quoted as saying.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed this week in intensified Israeli airstrikes.
This comes as Trump is on the last leg of a trip to some Arab states of the Persian Gulf region. He has mainly skirted the issue of the war in Gaza in his public remarks during the trip, but made comments to reporters after a roundtable with business leaders in Qatar.
“Gaza has been a territory of death and destruction for many years,” Trump said. “I have concepts for Gaza that I think are very good — make it a freedom zone. Let the United States get involved and make it just a freedom zone.”
Trump described aerial images of the widespread destruction from Israeli airstrikes on Gaza.
“There’s practically no building standing. It’s not like you’re trying to save something,” he said.
Israel’s far-right ruling coalition, led by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has embraced Trump’s proposals on Gaza to displace Palestinians permanently outside the territory and turn it into a seaside real-estate development.
Trump’s remarks about Gaza came on the same day the number of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks in the war surpassed 53,000 people — a third of them children.
All Arab states have rejected the plan, and the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement has called it ethnic cleansing.
Israel also carried out the latest strikes on the day Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, when around 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes by armed Zionist militias to make way for the creation of Israel in 1948.
With most of the 2.3 million people in Gaza internally displaced, some residents of the besieged strip say suffering is greater now than at the time of the Nakba.
“What we are experiencing now is even worse than the Nakba of 1948,” said Ahmed Hamad, a Palestinian in Gaza City who has been displaced multiple times.
Most Gazans have been displaced at least once during 19 months of war between Israel and Hamas.
Israel blocked all aid from entering Gaza on March 2, before resuming a brutal military campaign on March 18 after talks to prolong a six-week ceasefire collapsed.
Meanwhile, a US-backed humanitarian organization will start work in Gaza by the end of May under an aid distribution plan.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US-supported NGO, said it would begin distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza this month after talks with Israeli authorities.
It said it had asked Israel to secure distribution points in northern Gaza, and that Israel had agreed.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, Gisha, an Israeli NGO, said the aid plan in the besieged Gaza Strip “is designed to bring about the forced displacement of the population.”
“The plan is the next step in a string of moves aimed at consolidating control over the Strip and strangling the population and anyone trying to provide them relief,” Gisha said.
International aid agencies have already warned that Israeli plans to control aid distribution in Gaza, including the US-backed proposal, will only add to the suffering in the devastated Palestinian territory.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Thursday that 2,876 people have been killed since Israel resumed strikes on March 18.
It said the overall death toll in Gaza since the war broke out on October 7, 2023, stands at 53,010.
Separately, in the occupied West Bank, raids were ongoing and roads were blocked on Thursday after Israeli forces killed four Palestinians across the region.
Israel launched an intensified offensive against the occupied West Bank on January 21, claiming that it was targeting resistance fighters of the Jenin Battalion.
The regime has ramped up its West Bank violence since October 7, 2023, when it launched its genocide in Gaza. Since then, Israeli forces and settlers have killed about 1000 Palestinians in the occupied territory.
