JERUSALEM: Israeli forces blew up more residential buildings in Gaza City, killing at least 37 Palestinians, including a pregnant woman, her two children and a visually impaired man, as tanks pushed further into the densely populated city on Sunday.

“The mother, the boy, the girl, and the baby in her womb — we found them all gone,” said Mosallam Al-Hadad, the dead woman’s father-in-law, saying his son had been seriously injured in the strike. “(He) was in a critical condition. We took him to the hospital, and his leg was amputated,” Hadad said.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 65,283 people and wounded 166,575 since October 2023. Thousands more are believed to be buried under the rubble. The strikes on besieged Palestinian territory also caused famine and displaced the territory’s population — in many cases multiple times.

On Sunday, a number of Pales­tinians were attacked by Israeli settlers in a village south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, according to Al Jazeera Arabic, quoting local sources. The assault took place in the area of Khirbet Haribat al-Nabi in Masafer Yatta, a collection of Pale­stinian villages that have repeatedly been subjected to settler violence.

Senior doctor rejects Israeli military’s claim about Hamas sniper, saying his brother was visually impaired

Just a day ago, nearly 90 Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes across the territory, most of them in Gaza City.

Hamas sniper?

The Israeli military claimed on Sunday it had killed a Hamas sniper in a strike the day before, but a senior Gaza doctor who is the man’s brother rejected the claim as “a lie and slander”, saying his sibling was visually impaired.

Mohammed Abu Salmiya, director of Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, had been working in the emergency department on Saturday when his brother and sister-in-law’s bodies were brought in, telling AFP at the time that they were killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza City. He rejected the Israeli military’s accusation about Hamas sniper as “a lie, slander and an unacceptable justification for targeting civilians with direct missile strikes”.

“My brother is a 57-year-old man who suffers from several illnesses such as high blood pressure and diabetes, and he has severe vision impairment — and they claim he was a sniper? This is pure fabrication,” he told AFP, noting his brother’s family had been displaced several times over the past two years.

In recent weeks, the Israeli military has launched a heavy air and ground assault on Gaza City, claiming that it was an effort aimed at eliminating Hamas from the territory’s largest urban hub.

On Sunday, witnesses said Israeli tanks were advancing towards the west through Tel Al-Hawa, a southeastern suburb.

The Israeli military estimates that over 450,000 people have left the city since the start of September. Hamas authorities dispute this, saying under 300,000 left and that nearly a million people remain des­pite ongoing shelling. The offensive has also alarmed many Israelis, as thousands rallied on Saturday night outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s official residence in Jerusalem, calling on him to end the war.

Published in Dawn, September 22nd, 2025