People surround the bodies of Palestinians killed in an Israeli strike in front of the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, on Friday.
Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images
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Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images
TEL AVIV, Israel — It has been a deadly week of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the past few days, with more than 100 killed on Friday alone, according to Gaza health officials and hospital and morgue personnel contacted by NPR.
Hospital hallways have been flooded with the injured and dead. Many of the strikes have killed entire extended families, leaving survivors struggling to bury the dead.
No food or supplies have entered Gaza during more than two months of Israel’s blockade on the territory of more than 2 million people. Nearly half a million people face a “catastrophic situation of hunger” and the territory could fall into famine without immediate access to food, the World Health Organization said this week.
The United States and Israel recently announced a plan to get aid back into Gaza, but there’s no official timeline yet on when that plan would be rolled out.
Israeli’s military says in the past day it launched more than 150 strikes on Hamas militant sites.
The intense round of attacks came as President Trump was wrapping up five days of visiting Middle Eastern countries, which did not include Israel. There were hopes that during his time in the region there would be a breakthrough in the long-stalled talks to reach a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
But by the end of the week, that hope faded, Trump departed the region, and Israeli forces continued their bombardment of Gaza.
A man holds a small child’s corpse wrapped in shroud, with other wrapped bodies lying on the floor, in the Indonesian Hospital in Jabalia, in northern Gaza Strip, Wednesday.
Anas Baba/NPR
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Anas Baba/NPR
Israel says its military pressure campaign is the only way to defeat Hamas and bring home the living hostages and the bodies of dead captives still being held in Gaza. They were captured during the Hamas-led attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people, according to the Israeli government.
The number of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks in the war surpassed 53,000 people this week — a third of them children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Israeli authorities say they are sending a message to Hamas: This is the last chance to make a deal, or be prepared for a new expanded offensive in Gaza, with tens of thousands of Israeli reservists called up for duty.
NPR’s Anas Baba contributed reporting from the Gaza Strip.
