Israel pressed its assault against Gaza, home to 1.6 million Palestinians, on Saturday, March 1, killing 32 Palestinians, including at least five children.
"We are in the middle of a total war," Abu Alaa, a resident of the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) over phone as he and his children took cover.
"We hear the rockets and the explosions everywhere... we cannot leave our homes.
"They're shooting at everything that moves," he added.
Residents hid inside their homes and imams read out Qur'anic verses over loudspeakers from inside mosques, witnesses said.
Doctor Muawiya Hassanein, head of Gaza emergency medical services, said most of the dead were killed by a "great number of rockets fired by Israeli planes" in and around Jabaliya. Medics said the dead include at least four children and three women.
Among the dead was a Gazan mother who was preparing breakfast for her children when she was hit by gunfire.
A 12-year-old girl and her 11-year-old brother were also killed by shrapnel as they slept.
Four Palestinians, including three Hamas fighters, were killed in an Israeli army incursion in the Jabaliya refugee camp.
Four more Palestinians were also killed in an Israeli raid in the camp at dawn.
A 17-year-old girl and a fighter from the Islamic Jihad movement were also killed.
At least 200 Palestinian were also injured in the unabated Israeli attacks.
The Israeli army said that two Israeli soldiers were killed in clashes with Palestinian fighters in northern Gaza.
Israel Army Radio also reported five Israeli soldiers were lightly wounded in the clashes.
The new Palestinian deaths came a day after Deputy Israeli Defense Minister Matan Vilnai threatened that Israel would turn Gaza into a "bigger holocaust" for the Palestinians.
At least 70 Palestinians, third of whom children, have been killed in four days of Israeli raids and air strikes in the Gaza Strip.
The latest deaths brought to 6,227 the total number of people since the Palestinian intifada erupted in 2000, most of them Palestinians, according to an AFP count.
The flaring violence came as tens of thousands of Gazans took to the streets in the impoverished strip to protest the Israeli killing machine.
"They've killed my right to childhood," read a sign held by a child, clad in a red-stained white funeral shroud, who attended a large rally in Jabaliya.
Among the protesters in Gaza City was Khalil al-Hayyah, a Hamas leader who lost a 25-year-old son in an Israeli air strike Thursday.
"We will never recognize Israel, even if it assassinates all our leaders and kills our children," he told the crowd.
Sacked Hamas-led premier Ismail Haniyeh earlier said that the Palestinian people were facing a ferocious war.
"Gaza today faces a real war, a crazy war led by the enemy against our people," he told worshippers on Friday.
Haniyeh, whose group routed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas' security forces from Gaza in June, lashed out at the US administration for portraying the Israeli aggressions as "self-defense", accusing the Arab world of "encouraging the Israeli aggression" through its silence.
Abbas, who has shared Israel's hostility to Hamas since the group defeated his forces in Gaza, called Israeli threats "dangerous".
He urged Israel to cease its attacks on the territory and also called on Palestinian resistance groups to stop rocket attacks on Israel.
"It is in the interest of the Palestinian people not to give Israel any pretext to continue its aggression," Abbas' office said in a statement.
Israel claims that its offensives in the densely-populated Gaza aim at halting the rocket fire from Gaza into Israel.
A five-month Israeli incursion in 2006 killed several hundred Palestinians but failed to stop the rocket fire.
The chief of Israel's left-wing Meretz party, Yossi Beilin, said Hamas had offered a truce around Gaza over the past two weeks but the overtures had been rejected by the Israeli leadership.
According to a survey published in Haaretz newspaper on Wednesday, February 27,most Israelis think their government should hold direct talks with Hamas to reach a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and secure the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shilat, who was taken prisoner in a cross-border joint operation by Palestinian resistance groups.
http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/S...News/NWELayout
all i can say to this is:
Book 041, Number 6985:
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.
why should we by shy or ashamed of this hadith? these zionist jews are the most vile creatures on this planet they have killed 70 in 3 days including several children and BABIES. i cannot waittttttttt till the day this hadith is fulfilled.