JERUSALEM - Israeli airstrikes killed at least eight Palestinians in Gaza early Friday, officials there said, and the World Health Organization warned that a combination of high debts and severe shortages of medicine and fuel now threatened the Palestinian health services of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem with collapse.
Militants based in Gaza, seemingly undeterred by the four-day-old Israeli aerial assault, launched an intense volley of rockets into southern and central Israel, and said they had barely dented their arsenal of rockets amassed over the past few years. The barrage caused the first serious multiple civilian injuries on the Israeli side since the latest upsurge of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities escalated into a military confrontation.
With the latest lethal Israeli strikes in Gaza, Palestinian health officials said the death toll was approaching 100. The two sides appeared to be set on a course of continuing escalation, with no outside mediator yet having stepped in to broker a renewal of the cease-fire that came into effect after the last round of fierce, cross-border fighting, in November 2012.
In another ominous signal, a rocket was launched from Lebanon that struck open ground in northern Israel, putting Israeli forces in the north on alert and raising the specter of confrontation on a second front. An Israeli military official said it was too early to determine whether the act was 'symbolic or something more substantial.'
Israel responded with artillery fire aimed at the launch site in Lebanon, according to Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military. He said it was not immediately clear whether Hezbollah, the Shiite organization against which Israel fought a 34-day war in 2006, was responsible for the rocket fire from Lebanon.
In an emergency appeal for funds, the World Health Organization said the hostilities had exacerbated an already stressed Palestinian health system, particularly in isolated Gaza.
'The recent escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip raises concern about the ability of the Government and the Ministry of Health of the occupied Palestinian territory to cope with the increased burden of medical emergencies on the health system, given the high levels of shortages of medicines, medical disposables and hospital fuel supplies, and rising health care debt,' the organization's Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean said in a statement.
The statement said the organization and Palestinian Ministry of Health were 'calling on local and international donors to support the Ministry in coping with the current, difficult situation in the occupied Palestinian territory, especially in the Gaza Strip, that is affecting the health and welfare of Palestinians.'
It said a hospital, three clinics and a water desalinization facility in a refugee camp had been damaged in Gaza. In East Jerusalem, the statement said, hospitals were struggling because of millions of dollars in unpaid referral services, and that supplies of essential medicines in both the West Bank and Gaza were rapidly depleting. In Gaza alone, it said, the Health Ministry had only 10 days of fuel reserves to power hospitals during frequent breaks in electrical service.
In Israel's Mediterranean port city of Ashdod, a rocket from Gaza hit a gasoline station, causing multiple civilian injuries on the Israeli side for the first time since the beginning of the military operation early Tuesday. Israel's ambulance service said that eight people were injured, including a man, 61, who was severely wounded.
Locations hit or
targeted Sunday
through Thursday
Three more rockets fired from Gaza were intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system above the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, the military said.
Hamas, the Islamic group that dominates Gaza, and Islamic Jihad have both claimed responsibility for the rocket barrages that have reached much deeper into Israel than in the past and hit new targets spread across a wide area of the country.
The military wing of Hamas said it had warned foreign airlines to suspend flights to the 'Zionist entity,' meaning Israel, citing the risks involved because of the fighting. In a statement on its website, the group claimed to have hit Ben-Gurion International Airport, just outside Tel Aviv, on Friday morning, although the Israeli police denied the claim. Sirens did sound at the airport as part of a general alert as rockets headed for the Tel Aviv area, but none struck the airport, according to Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman.
'So far Hamas has utilized only a little of what it has prepared for the Zionist enemy,' the military wing of Hamas said in an earlier statement on its website, adding that it would continue 'to surprise' every day. 'We have prepared ourselves for a very long battle, not for a week or 10 days, as some have said, but for many long weeks.'
Of the eight Palestinians who were killed overnight in the airstrikes, five were from a family whose home was struck in the southern city of Rafah. Officials in Gaza said the other fatalities included a 10-year-old girl, who was killed in a strike on another house in Rafah; a Palestinian man killed in Israeli artillery fire there; and a pharmacist in Gaza City who was killed in an airstrike that targeted an apartment.
Israel says the homes that have been targeted serve as command and control centers for militant operatives who coordinate and guide the rocket fire against Israeli population centers. About 20 homes were struck on Thursday and early Friday. Israel says airstrikes on houses are preceded by warnings to the occupants, by telephone and other means, to vacate the properties. Despite the warnings, dozens of civilian casualties have been attributed to the attacks on houses.
Ahmed al-Shaer, a witness from Rafah, said that two rockets struck the house where five members of the Ghanem family were killed and that there was no advance warning.
According to data gathered by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 58 civilians had been killed in Gaza by Thursday afternoon, including 11 women and 21 children.
Colonel Lerner said the Israeli military was 'operating to minimize the civilian impact. But when Hamas embeds itself in the civilian population and uses it as a human shield,' he said, 'that makes it very difficult for us.'
Post By http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/12/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-strip-conflict.html
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