Israeli strikes on southern Gaza city of Rafah kill 22, mostly children, as U.S. advances aid package
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli strikes on the southern Gaza city of Rafah overnight killed 22 people, including 18 children, health officials said Sunday, as the United States was on track to approve billions of dollars of additional military aid to Israel, its close ally.
Israel has carried out near-daily air raids on Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has sought refuge from fighting elsewhere. It has also vowed to expand its ground offensive to the city on the border with Egypt despite international calls for restraint, including from the U.S.
“In the coming days, we will increase the political and military pressure on Hamas because this is the only way to bring back our hostages and achieve victory. We will land more and painful blows on Hamas — soon,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. He didn’t give details.
The first Israeli strike in Rafah killed a man, his wife and their young child, according to the nearby Kuwaiti Hospital, which received the bodies. The woman was pregnant and the doctors managed to save the baby, the hospital said. The second strike killed 17 children and two women from an extended family.
“These children were sleeping. What did they do? What was their fault?” asked one relative, Umm Kareem. Mohammed al Beheiri said that his daughter, Rasha, and her six children, the youngest 18 months old, were among those killed. A woman and three children were still under the rubble.
The Israel-Hamas war has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, at least two-thirds of them women and children, according to local health officials. It has devastated Gaza’s two largest cities and left a swath of destruction. About 80% of the territory’s population have fled to other parts of the besieged coastal enclave.
Gazans crammed into Rafah along the Egyptian border have no place to escape as Israeli attacks hit ever closer in a final bid to rescue remaining hostages.
The $26 billion in aid approved by the House of Representatives on Saturday includes about $9 billion in humanitarian assistance for Gaza, which experts say is on the brink of famine. The Senate could pass the package as soon as Tuesday, and President Biden has promised to sign it immediately.
The war, now in its seventh month, has sparked regional unrest pitting Israel and the U.S. against Iran and allied militant groups across the Middle East. Israel and Iran traded fire directly this month, raising fears of all-out war between the longtime foes.
Tensions have also spiked in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, with attacks by Israeli settlers increasing. Israeli troops killed two Palestinians who the military says attacked a checkpoint with a knife and a gun near the southern West Bank town of Hebron early Sunday. The Palestinian Health Ministry said the two killed were 18 and 19, from the same family. No Israeli forces were wounded, the army said.
Religious Zionists, most believing in a divine right to govern, now have outsize influence in Israel. The war in the Gaza Strip is energizing their settlement push.
‘We are surrounded,’ a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank says. Israeli settlers ‘come in uniforms so you can’t tell the difference between settler and soldier.’
Later, the military said its forces shot dead a 43-year-old Palestinian woman after she tried to stab a soldier in the northern West Bank near Beka’ot settlement.
The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service meanwhile said it had recovered 14 bodies from an Israeli raid in the Nur Shams urban refugee camp in the West Bank that began late Thursday. Those killed include three militants from the Islamic Jihad group and a 15-year-old boy. The military said it killed 14 militants in the camp and arrested eight suspects. Ten Israeli soldiers and one border police officer were wounded.
In a separate incident in the West Bank, an Israeli man was wounded in an explosion Sunday, the Magen David Adom rescue service said. A video circulating online shows a man approaching a Palestinian flag planted in a field. When he kicks it, it appears to trigger an explosive device.
At least 469 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank since the start of the war in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Most have been killed during Israeli military arrest raids, which often trigger gun battles, or in violent protests.
The war in Gaza was sparked by an unprecedented Oct. 7 raid into southern Israel in which Hamas and other militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 hostages. Israel says militants are still holding around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others.
More than three months into the Israel-Hamas war, the families of hostages held in Gaza have grown disillusioned with Israel’s military operations.
Thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets to call for new elections to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a deal with Hamas to release the hostages. Netanyahu has vowed to continue the war until Hamas is destroyed and all the hostages are returned.
The war has killed at least 34,097 Palestinians and wounded another 76,980, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry does not differentiate between combatants and civilians in its count but says at least two-thirds have been children and women. It also says the real toll is likely higher as many bodies are stuck beneath the rubble or in areas that medics cannot reach.
Israel blames Hamas for civilian casualties because the militants fight in dense, residential neighborhoods. The military rarely comments on individual strikes, which often kill women and children. The military says it has killed more than 13,000 Hamas fighters, but has not provided evidence.
Also on Sunday, Israeli leaders harshly criticized an expected decision by the U.S. to impose sanctions on a unit of ultra-Orthodox soldiers in the Israeli military.
The decision, expected as soon as Monday, would mark the first time the U.S. has imposed sanctions on a unit inside the Israeli military and further strain relations between the two allies.
While U.S. officials declined to identify the sanctioned unit, Israeli leaders and local media identified it as Netzah Yehuda — an infantry battalion founded roughly a quarter of a century ago to incorporate ultra-Orthodox men into the military. Many religious men receive exemptions from what is supposed to be compulsory service.
Israeli leaders condemned the decision as unfair. “If anyone thinks they can impose sanctions on a unit in the IDF, I will fight it with all my might,” Netanyahu said.
Netzah Yehuda, or Judea Forever, has historically been based in the occupied West Bank and some of its members have been linked to abuses against Palestinians. The unit came under heavy American criticism in 2022 after an elderly Palestinian American man was found dead shortly after he was detained at a West Bank checkpoint.
A Palestinian autopsy said Omar Assad, 78, had underlying health conditions, but had suffered a heart attack caused by “external violence.”
It said doctors found bruises on his head, redness on his wrists from being bound and bleeding in his eyelids from being tightly blindfolded. A military investigation said that Israeli soldiers assumed that Assad was asleep when they cut off the cables binding his hands. They didn’t offer medical help when they saw that he was unresponsive and left the scene without checking to see if he was alive.
Assad had lived in the U.S. for four decades. After an outcry from the U.S. government, the Israeli military said the incident “was a grave and unfortunate event, resulting from moral failure and poor decision-making on the part of the soldiers.” It said three officers were reprimanded or reassigned but it decided against criminal prosecution.
Human rights groups long have argued that Israel rarely holds soldiers accountable for the deaths of Palestinians.
Israel’s killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza is the latest example of an incident provoking outrage but potentially little deep change.
Amid the uproar with the U.S., Israel moved Netzah Yehuda out of the West Bank in late 2022 and reassigned it to northern Israel. The battalion was moved to the southern border with Gaza after Oct. 7.
In a statement Sunday, the army said its Netzah Yehuda soldiers “are currently participating in the war effort in the Gaza Strip.”
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Friday that he had made a decision on reviews of allegations that several Israeli military units had violated conditions for receiving U.S. assistance outlined in the so-called Leahy Law, which bars U.S. aid from going to foreign military units that have committed human rights abuses.
Benny Gantz, a far-right member of Israel’s wartime Cabinet, said in a statement that he spoke Sunday evening with Blinken and told him the decision was a “mistake” because it would harm Israel’s international legitimacy during wartime.
Two U.S. officials familiar with the situation said the U.S. announcement could come as soon as Monday.
Associated Press writer Jahjouh reported from Rafah and Magdy from Cairo. AP reporters Josef Federman and Jack Jeffery in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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