Compilation of news reports – IAK staff
Israel Destroyed North Gaza Hospital’s Water Tanks With Remote-Controlled Robots
Northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital underwent its worst night yet of Israeli attacks on Friday, the facility’s director has said, with Israeli forces destroying most of the hospital’s remaining water tanks and creating “catastrophic” conditions for the facility.
Hussam Abu Safiya, the hospital’s director, said that Israeli forces had detonated remote-controlled robots rigged with explosives in places “alarmingly close” to the hospital on Friday night. The explosions blew out windows and doors in the facility and took out the majority of the little water supplies the hospital has left on its rooftop, Safiya said.
“Tonight was one of the most difficult nights we have faced,” said Safiya. Israel has been besieging the hospital for weeks now, evidently seeking to destroy it and the rest of the hospitals in northern Gaza as part of its ethnic cleansing campaign there.
Israeli forces have also continuously carried out drone strikes, with one killing a nurse near the hospital and another killing a doctor from Kamal Adwan who was en route to another hospital in the region on Thursday. Friday’s attacks injured three medical staff, Safiya said.
“As of now, heavy bombing persists throughout the night, accompanied by ongoing destruction of buildings. It is a catastrophic scene, with airstrikes and artillery shelling occurring with unprecedented intensity and frequency,” said the hospital director.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has noted that Israel’s use of booby-trapped robots is a violation of international law, as they constitute weapons that cause indiscriminate damage to civilians and civilian infrastructure. Deliberately targeting civilian buildings like hospitals is also a violation of international law.
Israel’s attack on Nuseirat shredded people to pieces: Survivor
Mourad Bayoumi, who survived the Israeli attack that killed dozens of people in central Gaza on Thursday, describes horrific scenes after the strike.
“I was coming home; I saw the missile hit. It struck our neighbor’s house, shredding everyone to pieces,” Bayoumi told Al Jazeera.
“It was not a normal missile. These buildings have strong concrete foundations but look at them – reduced to ashes.”
UN Officer: Israel’s Bombs Are “Evaporating” Palestinians’ Bodies in Gaza
Israel is dropping bombs on Gaza with such destructive power that the strikes are disintegrating Palestinians’ bodies, a UN officer has reported as Israeli forces are killing dozens each day with relentless bombardments in the region.
UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) communications officer Louise Wateridge told BBC that doctors at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza have told her that bodies are “evaporating” due to strikes on tent camps for Palestinians who have been forcibly displaced due to Israeli forces destroying the vast majority of buildings.
Doctors “speak about the strikes being so fierce and relentless. People are now sheltering in tents. They have much less protection than they did a year ago when they were in buildings,” Wateridge said. “They’re telling me that bodies are completely evaporating, and they’re not even finding remains of people anymore after these strikes because there is no protection for them at all.”
Many Palestinians in Israel’s designated “humanitarian safe zone” in southern Gaza are sheltering in tents and makeshift shelters after being displaced, for most multiple times. Despite these tent camps being relatively bare, with little but tarps and cloths above families’ heads, Israeli forces have dropped 2,000-pound bombs and other bombs with huge destructive power on the region.
Israel has killed 700 Gazan aid truck guards, enabling looting and chaos
The Israel’s military actions and inaction are aggravating the already devastating humanitarian aid situation practice of killing Palestinians who protect the aid convoys.
According to Gaza officials, Israel has killed at least 700 Gazan police who were tasked with protecting aid trucks since October 2023. Just on Thursday, Israeli forces killed 15 Palestinians who were guarding humanitarian convoys, Gaza medics said.
Israeli forces claimed that the people they killed were members of Hamas who were there to loot the convoy. But there is no evidence to support Israel’s claims, and in fact, Hamas forces have themselves been killing members of the looting gangs, Hamas has said and the UN has found.
Further exacerbating the food shortage, reports have found that Israel is empowering gangs to loot what little aid Israeli forces do allow in. An internal UN memo reported by The Washington Post last month found that such gangs “may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” from Israeli soldiers.
These gangs operate in areas under Israel’s military control, on or nearby main aid routes, meaning that they are hijacking or attacking trucks while under the military’s watchful eye.
RECOMMENDED READING: Israel occupation army burns truck carrying goods into Gaza
Israeli Military Bombing of Gaza ‘By Far the Most Intense, Destructive, and Fatal’ Airwars Has Analyzed
One advocate said of this Airwars report, “Save this for the next time you hear that the Israeli military does everything possible to avoid harming civilians, and that the level of civilian harm in Gaza is less than other comparable conflicts.”
The world’s The world’s foremost monitor of civilian harm caused by aerial bombardment published a report Thursday calling the first 25 days of Israel’s ongoing U.S.-backed annihilation of Gaza the worst assault on noncombatants it has ever seen.
U.K.-based Airwars—which over its decadelong existence has meticulously and painstakingly documented civilian casualties in various campaigns of the U.S.-led so-called War on Terror, Russia’s bombing of Ukraine and Syria, Turkish attacks on Syria and Iraq, and other conflicts—published a “patterns of harm analysis” examining the first few weeks of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.
“By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign,” Airwars said in a summary of the report. “It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.”
The report pushes back on claims that Israel “does everything possible to avoid harming civilians,” and that “the level of civilian harm in Gaza is broadly consistent with, and even favorable to, other comparable conflicts in recent decades.”
(Read the full report here.)
Israeli Forces Kill a Young Man With Disabilities Near Hebron
Israeli forces fatally shot a Palestinian young man with disabilities, on Friday, after storming the town of Beit Awwa, west of Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank.
According to Mohammad Rabie, the director of the Doura Governmental Hospital, the critically injured young man, Mohammad Ahmad Suleiman Masalma, 23, arrived at the hospital’s emergency department on Friday afternoon.
Rabie added that medical staff performed life-saving measures which failed, and the disabled young man succumbed to a gunshot wound to the chest.
Media sources said that special Israeli forces invaded the town of Beit Awwa, surrounded a home and fired many live rounds at citizens and killing Masalma.
Since the beginning of the Israeli military onslaught against the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023, Israeli forces have killed 813 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 169 children, and injured 6,450.
Israeli army claims it discovered ‘large weapons cache’ in southern Lebanon
The Israeli military says it is continuing to “neutralize” threats from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
In a statement, the army said its troops had discovered a “large cache of weapons” and confiscated an antitank missile launch site that the Lebanese armed group had used to target northern Israel over the past year.
However, a photo the Israeli army released of the weapons showed only two muddied machine guns along with several helmets and what appeared to be four short-range antitank rockets.
Israeli army commits 5 more cease-fire violations in southern Lebanon
The Israeli army on Friday committed five more violations of the Israel-Lebanon cease-fire, which took effect last month to end a year-long conflict between the Israeli army and the Hezbollah group.
According to the official Lebanese National News Agency (NNA), the Israeli violations concentrated in the districts of Tyre and Sidon in southern Lebanon, including air raids and drones flights. Another raid was documented on the town of Naqoura, according to NNA.
Lebanese authorities have reported around 220 Israeli violations of the cease-fire since the deal came into force on Nov. 27.
UK granted Israeli army chief ‘special immunity’ for secret London trip
The UK’s Labor Government gave Israeli Army Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi diplomatic immunity to allow him to visit the UK for secret meetings without the risk of being arrested for war crimes charges, Scotland’s The National reported on 12 December.
The meetings came just days after an international arrest warrant was issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing him of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his efforts to starve Palestinians in Gaza.
During his visit, Halevi met with top UK defense officials, as well as with Attorney General Richard Hermer, the UK Government’s chief law officer.
Netherlands court dismisses request to block arms exports to Israel
A Dutch court has thrown out a case aiming to stop the government from exporting arms to Israel.
“There is no reason to impose a total ban on the export of military and dual-use goods on the state,” said the court in The Hague. “All claims are dismissed.”
A coalition of pro-Palestine groups had argued that Dutch authorities were failing to prevent Israeli “genocide” during its war on Gaza.
CAIR Condemns Ongoing Biden Admin-Enabled Israeli Mass Slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today condemned the continuing Biden administration-enabled mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza, including an Israeli airstrike targeting a post office housing displaced families. Most of those murder using U.S.-supplied weapons were women and children.
In a statement, CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper said:
As President Biden insults the American Muslim community and all other people of conscience with a call to challenge Islamophobia domestically, his administration is simultaneously sending U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons to the Islamophobic, genocidal government of indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to continue slaughtering Palestinian civilians, destroying mosques, and desecrating Qurans. This hypocrisy must end. So must the slaughter, forced starvation, ethnic cleansing, and mass destruction of Gaza.
He noted that earlier this month, CAIR said the Biden administration must end arms shipments to Israel after a new report by Amnesty International, titled “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” concludes that Israel has committed – and still is committing – genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Democrats call on Biden administration to asses Israeli compliance with law
At least 77 US Democrats have signed a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin urging the administration to provide a “full assessment” of Israel’s compliance with US arms policies and laws.
The legislators said they are “deeply troubled by the continued level of civilian casualties and humanitarian suffering in Gaza”.
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“Are you honestly telling me that you have nothing to say about Israel striking 300 sites in this country?”
HTS spokesman refuses to address Israel’s brutal airstrikes on Syria following the fall of Assad’s government, avoiding the question twice when asked by @Channel4News. pic.twitter.com/vytujAdmtT
— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) December 12, 2024
STATISTICS OCTOBER 7, 2023 – DECEMBER 13, 2024:
Palestinian death toll from October 7, 2023 – December 13, 2024: at least 45,743* – 44,930 in Gaza; in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers and/or settlers have killed at least 813 Palestinians (~169 of them children).
Thousands of those killed in Gaza have yet to be identified, and an estimated 11,000 more are still buried under rubble.
According to a report in the Lancet, by multiplying the reported deaths by five, it is possible to reach a conservative estimate of total deaths (including indirect causes like starvation and lack of medicine). Using the latest figure from AFP (44,930), it is reasonable to estimate at least 224,650 total deaths in Gaza since October 7th, 2023.
According to a recent report by the UN Human Rights Office of identified fatalities in Gaza, about 44% were children. It is reasonable to estimate that 19,769 of known direct deaths and 98,846 of the total deaths are children.
Since Israel launched an extermination campaign in northern Gaza in early October, over 4,000 Palestinians have been killed or are missing and another 12,000 wounded.
[*The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.]Since October 7th, 2023:
- At least 49 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons (at least 30 from Gaza).
- At least 43 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition (at least 37 of them children)**.
- About 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are currently displaced.
- About 345,000 Gazans are currently experiencing catastrophic levels of food insecurity.
Palestinian injuries from October 7, 2023 – December 13, 2024: at least 112,584 (including at least 106,356 in Gaza and 6,450 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how many Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.]
Reported Israeli death toll from October 7, 2023 – December 13, 2024: ~1,592 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 414*** military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza (updated: Dec 9); 39 military and civilians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel) and~10,000 injured.
The death toll in Lebanon since October 8, 2023 is at least 4,047, of which 3,961 were killed in the final months before the ceasefire; most of the 16,638 injuries also occurred toward the end of the war.
NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries of Israelis on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.
*Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.
**Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals.
***The figure does not include the reportedly 56 Israeli soldiers – nearly 16% of the total Israeli military deaths – killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents.
† For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics.
Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here.
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