PALESTINIAN TERRITORY/JERUSALEM: The Israeli army said on Saturday that its forces had rescued four Israeli hostages alive from Gaza after a “complex daylight operation.”
“Noor Al-Ghamani (25), Almog Meir Yan (21), Andrey Kozlov (27) and Shlomi Ziv (40) were kidnapped by the Hamas terrorist cell from the Nova music festival on October 7,” the army said in a statement, adding that the four were in “good health.”
The Israeli army also said in an unusual statement on Saturday that it was targeting militant facilities in the Nuseirat area of Gaza, and the Gaza Health Ministry reported dozens of people were wounded.
It is unusual for the Israeli military to publicly announce its operations while they are underway.
Israel pressed ahead with bombing raids on Gaza on Saturday as its war minister looked set to make good on his threat to quit the government under mounting pressure over the conduct of the military operation.
Witnesses and AFP journalists said the attacks rocked different parts of the Gaza Strip and appeared to be concentrated in the centre of the Palestinian territory.
The attacks continued despite increased scrutiny of Israel after Israeli warplanes struck a UN-run school on Thursday and a Gaza hospital said 37 people were killed.
The Israeli military confirmed the attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp, saying it targeted a Hamas base and killed 17 “terrorists”.
Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, accused the Israeli military of providing “false information”. The group claimed that the three men reported by Israel as dead were in fact still alive.
UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees that runs the school, condemned the Israeli attack on the facility, which was housing 6,000 displaced people.
In a post on social media platform “X,” the department said “schools that had taken refuge” were attacked “without prior warning.”
“The targeting of UN facilities or their use for military purposes must not become the new normal. This must stop and all those responsible must be held accountable,” the statement said.
Israel accuses Hamas and its allies in the Gaza Strip of using civilian infrastructure, including UN-run facilities, as bases of operations, a charge the militants deny.
Now in its nineth month, the war has caused widespread devastation in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, where one in 20 residents have been killed or injured, according to the strip's health ministry, and most of its 2.4 million residents are displaced.
The grim reality was underscored by AFP video showing the aftermath of the airstrikes, with men salvaging what they could from bombed-out buildings in Gaza City and carrying bodies wrapped in cloth through rubble-strewn alleyways.
Maher al-Mughal, who lives nearby, described Friday's attack: “We heard what sounded like a drone firing a missile, then we heard what sounded like a missile fired from an F-16 fighter jet.
“So we went and found women and children who were mutilated. What did these children and women do wrong? They are defenseless people, just civilians,” he told AFPTV.
In the same city on Saturday, Israeli warplanes bombed the Muhanna family home in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, killing five people and wounding seven, according to Gaza emergency authorities.
Meanwhile, doctors at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said six people were killed and others wounded in an Israeli rocket attack on the Bureiji refugee camp in central Gaza, and witnesses said gunfights raged inside the camp.
The Israeli army said yesterday it had struck “dozens of terrorist cells and infrastructure” in Deir al-Barakh and Bureiji. The army also carried out operations in Rafah.
The war began with an October 7 attack by Hamas that killed 1,194 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Fighters from Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups also took 251 hostages, of which 120 remain in the Gaza Strip, 41 were killed, the army said.
Israel's retaliatory military attacks have killed at least 36,731 people in the Gaza Strip, the majority of them civilians, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip's health ministry.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is due to address the U.S. Congress next month, is also facing pressure from within his right-wing government.
The office of Benny Gantz, the cabinet minister in charge of war, announced he would hold a press conference on Saturday, the same day he gave Netanyahu a deadline last month to approve a post-war plan for Gaza.
Israeli media have speculated that Gantz, a centrist former army commander who was one of Netanyahu's main rivals before joining the war cabinet, is likely to follow through on his threat to resign.
But such a move is not expected to affect the stability of Netanyahu's government, a coalition of the right-wing Likud and far-right and ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties.
The latest efforts to broker a ceasefire, the first since a week-long ceasefire in November, appear to have stalled, a week after U.S. President Joe Biden laid out a new roadmap.
Biden, who is under pressure to end the war ahead of the November presidential election, has said he plans to halt fighting for six weeks while he swaps the hostages for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
The plan also includes increasing aid supplies to Gaza.
The proposal is supported by G7 and Arab nations, with 16 leaders backing Biden's call for Hamas to accept the agreement.
Hamas has yet to respond to Biden's oversight, and Israel has signalled an openness to talks but remains committed to destroying the Islamist group.
