Updates: Israeli attack on Gaza’s Beit Lahiya kills at least 73

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To know more about what the US and Israel want for Gaza after Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s death, read an analysis here.

To understand how Israel is trying to generate civil strife in Lebanon by spreading panic and fear across the country, read this.

And if you want to know what defence ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) countries said about threats to United Nations peacekeepers targeted by Israel in Lebanon, see here.

But before that, let’s get you up to speed with the latest developments:

• At least 73 people have been killed in an Israeli attack on north Gaza’s Beit Lahiya, according to the territory’s Government Media Office.
• Oxfam has condemned the killing of water engineers in an Israeli attack east of Khan Younis, in Gaza’s south.
• Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, has said that 20,000 people were forced to flee the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza yesterday, including from UN shelters.
• Gaza health officials have said Israeli forces surrounded and shelled the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya.
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed “agents of Iran” for a drone attack on his home in Israel’s Caesarea. Iran’s UN mission said Hezbollah carried out the attack.
• In Lebanon, Israeli forces have conducted heavy strikes on several locations in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
• The Israeli military has said it targeted Hezbollah’s intelligence command centre in the Lebanese capital and several munitions warehouses belonging to the group.
• US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called on Israel to “scale back” some of its strikes in and around Beirut.

Hamas political bureau member Khalil Al-Hayya gave an interview to our colleagues at XEn News Arabic after an Israeli attack on Beit Lahiya killed at least 73 people earlier this evening.

Here are a few highlights from his interview:

• “The Zionist occupation [Israel] is carrying out a programmed operation to displace our people in northern Gaza.”
• “The occupation’s massacre in the Beit Lahiya project must not go unnoticed.”
• “The Arab and Islamic masses must besiege the [Israeli] occupation embassies and the American embassies.”
• “We doubt that the occupation army will be able to implement the generals’ plan, and the enemy is lying when it says that it is not [trying to implement it]. Our people in the Gaza Strip will not respond to the Israeli generals’ plan to displace them.”
• “We must remind everyone of their historical responsibility towards the massacres committed by the occupation.”

A young Palestinian man, Karim Imad Mazid, has been killed after he was run over by an Israeli army four-wheel drive in Anabta, in the Tulkarem governorate of the occupied West Bank, the Wafa news agency is reporting.

Israeli forces raided Anabta from the Anab checkpoint in the east and chased and stopped several vehicles before running over Mazid, Wafa added.

At least 757 people have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank since October last year, according to the Ministry of Health.

Medics will have great difficulties in dealing with the mass casualties event in Beit Lahiya considering how stretched the healthcare system in the north of Gaza is amid Israeli restrictions and bombing, Dr Ali Elaydi, a Dallas-based surgeon from Gaza, tells XEn News.

“We’re dealing with a hospital system in an area where the system is already overrun, and when you have this mass casualty [event], given the lack of supplies and the lack of ability to treat. … it’s totally unreasonable to expect them to be able to take care of these patients,” Elaydi said.

Elaydi operated inside Gaza before the Israeli army barred him from entering in June. And from June onwards, healthcare workers who were permitted to enter the enclave were allowed only one piece of baggage for each mission, he said.

“It’s very clear that they are robbing Palestinians even the basic, the most basic, necessities,” he added.

XEn News’s Hani Mahmoud reports that at least five displaced Palestinians sheltering in a tent in the central Gaza Strip city were wounded when the Israeli army attacked a building adjacent to where they were staying.

Debris and shrapnel from the attack fell onto the tent, injuring those inside.

“I made a phone call to the Al-Aqsa Hospital emergency department and I was told the following: A man and a woman are in critical condition. They were transferred immediately to the operating theatre because they were bleeding severely as they were hit directly by the flying shrapnel,” Mahmoud said from Deir el-Balah.

Palestinian-American journalist Said Arikat told XEn News that what’s happening in Gaza is “genocide, plain and simple”.

“Israel has been conducting genocide in a different level all throughout its existence against the Palestinians,” Arikat said.

Responding to Israel’s latest attack on Beit Lahiya in the north of the Gaza Strip, Arikat added that Israel’s aim is to depopulate Gaza by making it uninhabitable, “which probably it is today, anyway”.

“We see that 400,000 people in northern Gaza are being trapped with no access to medical care or food or shelter,” he said.

Western leaders say Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s killing could open the door for a possible ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the war is not over, and Hamas has ruled out the release of Israeli captives until the war ends.

So, is the Western push for a post-war Gaza hasty and unrealistic?

Watch XEn News’s Inside Story to hear the debate:

The humanitarian organisation says four water engineers and workers were killed when they were attacked on their way to repair water infrastructure in Khuza’a, east of Khan Younis, in the south of the Gaza Strip.

“Despite prior coordination with Israeli authorities their clearly-marked vehicle was bombed,” Oxfam said in a statement.

“Their deaths deepen the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza where access to clean water is already severely compromised,” Oxfam added.

The engineers and workers were from the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU) which Oxfam says it partners with.

“Oxfam stands in solidarity with the CMWU, their partners and the families of the victims,” the statement added.

This particular attack is a reminder of the initial weeks of this genocidal war – the intensity, the scale, the number of repeated attacks, just a culmination of these 15 days of ongoing horror in the entire northern part [of Gaza].

Let’s not forget that people have endured 15 days of not having any proper access to food, water, supplies or any life-saving resources or items, and have been forced to flee from one area to another until they ended up in the Project area.

People have not only endured that but now, they are paying a heavy price for this ground incursion and aggressive invasion of the northern cities of the Gaza Strip.

Beit Lahiya is a city located in northern Gaza close to Jabalia and Beit Hanoon. The three cities have been heavily targeted in the past two weeks since Israel stepped up its military offensive in the north of the Strip.

The Israeli army says its goal is to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping there.

To do so, the Israeli army has been heavily bombarding areas in the north. To put it in perspective, Israel launched, in two days last week, 118 attacks in northern Gaza, almost as many as the total for all of September, which amounted to 140, according to the UN.

The Israeli military also prevented food from entering in the north for at least two weeks further exacerbating an already dire humanitarian crisis for the about 400,000 people trapped in the north.

The reports we are getting right now are that more than 70 people were killed in the Beit Lahiya Project area. That’s towards the western part of the northern Gaza Strip.

People were forced to evacuate to that area due to the scale and the intensity of the massive Israeli bombardment that was taking place in the more central and eastern parts, particularly in Jabalia.

So, many people were forced into that area, and as soon as they gathered, they got bombed and killed in the places they were seeking shelter.

The confirmed reports we got say multiple air strikes took place targeting an entire residential block in western Beit Lahiya cit – very packed with people, the local residents as well as those who evacuated earlier.

The attack was so massive that it shook the entire western part of Beit Lahiya. Buildings collapsed while people were still inside. They were not given a chance to leave or evacuate. No warnings were given to people to evacuate.

The numbers are going to be increasing in the coming hours as many people are trapped under the rubble.

Paramedics and Civil Defence crew are unable to get to that area given the intensity of the artillery and the fact that many of the surveillance drones are hovering and preventing anyone from getting close to that particular site.

In his latest news conference, the Israeli army’s chief spokesperson, Daniel Hagari, claimed that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been hiding underground throughout the war before being killed.

In February, Hagari said that the army entered Khan Younis where they had located an underground route where Sinwar stayed.

That forced Sinwar to escape to an underground space in Rafah’s Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood. “The complex had everything he needed – television, food, sofas, beds, means of communication and control,” Hagari said.

The army was able to identify the location after finding his DNA samples on a tissue there, with which he blew his nose. Hagari said the location was a few hundred metres away from the tunnel where six Israeli captives were killed.

“According to our intelligence, Sinwar hid most of the time underground in the area between Khan Younis and Rafah, and came out only to escape – accompanied by bodyguards and with documents, certificates, weapons and money,” he added.

As we reported earlier the Gaza Media Office has released a statement on the recent Israeli attack on Beit Lahiya where at least 73 people were killed.

The document also said the air strike came as Israel was “destroying the health system in the northern Gaza Strip governorate, which is currently home to about 400,000 people”.

Israeli forces have “threatened hospitals and demanded that medical staff evacuate and leave them immediately. The occupation is also preventing fuel from reaching these hospitals, and the occupation has cut off communications and the Internet in the area, which has caused a deep humanitarian crisis,” read the statement.

The Israeli army has announced that another one of its soldiers have died after being seriously injured while fighting in southern Lebanon on October 9.

The military identified the 38-year-old as Yishai Greenbaum.