Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday he would restart indirect negotiations with Hamas aimed at returning the remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza. But Netanyahu said he would not halt Israel’s military campaign to seize Gaza City while forcibly displacing its nearly 1 million inhabitants.
Israel’s unrelenting attacks continued overnight, with at least 25 Palestinians killed since the early hours of Friday. Among the dead are at least 12 civilians killed when Israel bombed a school sheltering displaced families in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood. In Deir al-Balah, 23-year-old Saja Hamad is recovering from injuries after her dramatic rescue from the rubble of her home following an Israeli airstrike on the Nuseirat refugee camp.
Saja Hamad: “I didn’t feel anything. I was just sleeping in the other room, and suddenly I heard nothing. I just found myself under the rubble. Everything fell onto my face. I was screaming, calling for my family. I thought they were dead. … I did not expect they would still be alive. I thought I would end up alone.”
An internal Israeli intelligence database indicates that at least 83% of Palestinians killed in Israel’s onslaught on Gaza were civilians. That’s according to a joint investigation by The Guardian and the Israeli news sites Local Call and +972 Magazine, who report the proportion of civilians slaughtered by Israel has few parallels in modern warfare.