Thousands fled their homes in a Gaza town yesterday after Israel warned them to leave ahead of threatened attacks on rocket-launching sites, on the sixth day of an offensive that Palestinian officials said has killed at least 160 people, reports Reuters.
“Those who fail to comply with the instructions will endanger their lives and the lives of their families. Beware,” read a leaflet dropped by the Israeli military in the town of Beit Lahiya, near the border with Israel.
The warning came as Israeli naval commandos reportedly launched an early morning raid on a beach in the north of Gaza City, on the bloodiest day yet of the six-day Israeli assault, with 54 Palestinians reported killed, reports British newspaper The Guardian.
In the worst single incident of the conflict so far, 22 people were killed and 45 injured when two large Israeli bombs slammed into a house in the Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City where the city’s chief of police, Tayseer Batsh, was sheltering.
Most of the injured were returning home from a mosque when they were caught by shrapnel from the blast.
Militants in the Islamist-ruled Gaza Strip kept up rockets salvoes deep into the Jewish state and the worst bout of Israel-Palestinian bloodshed in two years showed no signs of abating despite mounting international pressure to cease fire.
A Palestinian woman and a girl, aged 3, were killed in Israeli air strikes early yesterday, Gaza’s Health Ministry said. Hours earlier, the ministry said 18 people were killed when the house of Gaza’s police chief was bombed from the air in the single deadliest attack of Israel’s offensive.
Despite intensified Israeli military action – which included a commando raid overnight in what was Israel’s first reported ground action in Gaza during the current fighting – militants continued to launch rocket after rocket across the border.
A long-range salvo yesterday morning triggered air raid sirens at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion international airport, which has not been hit in the hostilities and where flights have been operating normally, and some city suburbs.
No one has been killed by the more than 800 rockets the Israeli military said has been fired since the offensive began, and during Saturday night’s barrage, customers in Tel Aviv beachfront cafes shouted their approval as they watched the projectiles being shot out of the sky.
Israeli leaflets dropped on Beit Lahiya, where 70,000 Palestinians live, said civilians in three of its 10 neighbourhoods were “requested to evacuate their residences” and move south, deeper into the Gaza Strip.
The Gaza Interior Ministry, in a statement on Hamas radio, dismissed the Israeli warnings as “psychological warfare” and instructed those who left their homes to return and others to stay put.
At least 4,000 people fled Beit Lahiya and crowded into eight UN-run schools in Gaza City yesterday, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency said.
International pressure on both sides for a return to calm has increased, with the UN Security Council calling for a cessation of hostilities and Western foreign ministers were due to meet to weigh strategy.
