 | « Back to article | Print this article |
At least five Palestinians were killed in Israeli air strikes in Gaza on Saturday as the war entered its 47th day following the collapse of a fragile truce, even as Israel's hawkish foreign minister said that the offensive would continue until "Hamas waves the white flag".
In an interview with Channel 2, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that the government needs to spell out "a strategic goal" that encompasses "defeating Hamas and bringing it to submission".
"That means Hamas waves the white flag. That is a realistic scenario, and it must be a goal," he emphasised.
The two sides resumed hostilities on Tuesday after the collapse of an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire and talks aimed at finding a lasting end to the current fighting.
Five members of a Palestinian family were killed in air strikes on a home in central Gaza on Saturday morning, as Israel continued to bombard the besieged coastal enclave on the 47th day since the start of Operation Protective Edge on July 8.
The strikes took the Palestinian death toll in Gaza to 2,098 with more than 10,550 injured, Gaza medics said.
UN agencies have claimed that 70 per cent of those killed in Gaza are civilians, including women and children, amid Israeli claims that the militant factions have been using civilians as "human shields".
The strike on Saturday morning hit the home of the Dahrouj family in al-Zawayda neighbourhood in the central Gaza Strip, killing a couple and their three children.
Spokesman for the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Ashraf al-Qudra, said that the rescue workers were able to recover all the five bodies after an Israeli airstrike levelled the home of the Dahrouj family.
Israeli warplanes also destroyed three mosques in Gaza with the military saying that 30 sites have been targeted in air strikes so far.
Israel Defence Forces targets included underground rocket launchers, facilities for storing and manufacturing weapons, and apartments used to coordinate terrorist attacks, security sources said.
One of the mosques destroyed was allegedly being used for meetings between members of Hamas' military wing in southern Gaza, a second was used to store terrorist infrastructure in southern Gaza, while the third in the north was used as a meeting point for Hamas members, security sources said.
Gaza militants have fired a record number of rockets at Israel since the collapse of the ceasefire, they added. Sixty-eight Israelis, mostly soldiers, have been killed so far in the fighting.
The war is the deadliest in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the 2005 end of the second Intifada, or uprising.