—— Gaza’s sole power plant shuts down
—— Over 1,000 Palestinians killed, 5,000 injured
—— Hamas calls on Western media to be wary of ‘adopting the Israeli narrative without verification’
—— Israeli death toll crosses 1,200
—— UN says over 260,000 people displaced in Gaza
DM Monitoring
GAZA: The only power plant in the Gaza Strip, which is under fierce Israeli bombardment and siege, shut down on Wednesday after it ran out of fuel, said the Palestinian enclave’s electricity authority.
“The only power plant in the Gaza Strip stopped functioning at 2pm (1100 GMT),” the authority’s head Jalal Ismail said in a statement, having earlier warned that it was running short of fuel.
“We’ve decided to cut the supply of water, electricity and fuel, and now their local power plant has collapsed and there’s no electricity in Gaza,” the Israeli energy minister, Israel Katz, said in a statement.
“We’ll continue tightening the siege until the Hamas threat on Israel and the world is removed,” he added.
The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees told Al Jazeera that it had less than two weeks’ supply of food and water to assist the more than 180,000 Palestinians who have sought refuge in their schools in Gaza.
Gaza’s health ministry said on Wednesday afternoon at least 1,055 Palestinians had been killed and 5,184 injured in the crowded coastal enclave since Saturday’s surprise attack while Israel’s military said the death toll there had reached 1,200 and more than 2,700 people had been wounded. Israel’s army said the bodies of roughly 1,500 fighters had been found.
Israel said it had regained control of the border areas from the Palestinian group Hamas.
Separately, UN Secretary General Spokesman Stephane Dujarric has said at least 11 UN staff and personnel, as well as 30 students at UN schools, have been killed in the Gaza Strip since Hamas fighters launched their attack on Israel. “11 UNRWA staff and personnel have been killed since Saturday,” spokesman Dujarric told reporters, referring to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees which also runs schools in Gaza.
“30 UNRWA students have also been killed and another eight have been injured.”
Fears of a regional conflagration have surged ahead of an expected Israeli ground incursion into Gaza, the crowded, impoverished enclave from where Hamas launched its land, air and sea attack on the Jewish Sabbath.
International NGOs issued a stark warning over the health and humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a political rival have announced an emergency government for the duration of the conflict.
The veteran right-wing leader was joined by the centrist Benny Gantz, a former defence minister, in the government and war cabinet as both put aside bitter political divisions that have roiled the country and sparked mass protests.
Netanyahu struck the political deal with Gantz and pledged to freeze for now his government’s flashpoint judicial overhaul plan that has sparked an unprecedented wave of mass protests since the start of the year.
Netanyahu’s extreme-right and ultra-Orthodox Jewish allies will remain in government, however.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid has not joined the temporary alliance, although the joint statement said a seat would be “reserved” for him in the war cabinet.
“Israel before anything else,” Gantz wrote in a social media post while the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote that he “welcomes the unity, now we must win”. “My entire life, I have seen Israel kill us, confiscate our lands and arrest our children,” said Farah al-Saadi, 52, a coffee vendor from Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank who praised the Hamas offensive.
The Israeli army has called up 300,000 reservists and massed tanks and other heavy armour both near Gaza and on the northern border with Lebanon, where exchanges of fire continued.
The military said its forces had largely reclaimed the embattled south and the border around Gaza, and dislodged holdout Hamas fighters from more than a dozen towns and kibbutzim.
Earlier, for the third time in 24 hours, an Israeli air strike hit Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt, an AFP photographer and an NGO said. White smoke billowed from among fishing boats after an air strike on Gaza’s port, and in Jerusalem, the deserted streets were targeted by Hamas rocket fire.
“Israeli people they are scared of the Arabs and the Arabs are scared of the Jews… everybody is scared of each other,” said Ahmed Karkash, a shop owner in the Old City.
At least 30 people have been killed and hundreds wounded as Israel pounded the Gaza Strip with hundreds of air strikes overnight, a Hamas government official said on Wednesday.
Dozens of residential buildings, factories, mosques and shops were hit, the head of the government’s media office, Salama Marouf, told media. –Agencies
