Despite mounting international condemnation, Israel is intensifying its shelling of Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on Sunday.
“The war is exacting a very heavy cost from us,” he said during a weekly cabinet meeting. “However, we have no choice but to continue to fight.”
The IDF reportedly lost 15 troops in Gaza over the weekend, with all but one of the losses occurring on Friday and Saturday.
Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, a military spokesperson, told reporters on Saturday that Israel targeted 200 targets in a single 24-hour period over the same weekend. One of those strikes, targeting Gaza City, killed 90 Palestinians, including 76 members of a single extended family, making it one of the deadliest strikes in what has already proven to be an unusually destructive bombing campaign aided by a controversial AI targeting programme dubbed a “mass assassination factory.”
The IDF has increased its operations in both the north, where Gaza City and its environs have been substantially levelled following West Jerusalem’s controversial evacuation order, which UN human rights experts have condemned as a war crime, and in a “dense area” in the southern city of Khan Younis.
With over 20,000 Palestinians reported by Gaza’s Health Ministry to be killed and another 53,000 said to be wounded, the death toll of Israel’s war has attracted condemnation from the United Nations, international humanitarian organizations, and even its staunch allies in the US. In a phone call with his Israeli counterpart on Saturday, US President Joe Biden reportedly emphasized the “critical need” to protect civilian lives.
However, Biden stressed that he “did not ask for a ceasefire” during their conversation, and the US was accused of watering down a UN Security Council resolution that passed on Friday demanding large-scale aid deliveries be allowed into Gaza.
Netanyahu expressly refuted a Wall Street Journal report published on Saturday, which said he cancelled a planned operation against Hezbollah due to US pressure just four days after Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis in an October 7 massacre.
While the report claimed that West Jerusalem was ready to launch a multi-pronged “preemptive strike” against the Lebanese militant group, only for Biden to point out that doing so would inevitably spark a wider war, Netanyahu insisted that the IDF’s decisions on whether or not to attack its neighbours were entirely independent.
“Israel is a sovereign state,” he declared on Sunday.
