Zionist Tanks Open Fire on Besieged Gaza Strip Following a Bomb Explosion

Zionist battle tanks have targeted the southern part of the Gaza Strip as the Tel Aviv regime goes ahead with its acts of aggression against the besieged Palestinian coastal sliver.

The Israeli military announced in a statement on Saturday that it had struck an observation post belonging to the Palestinian movement, Hamas, east of Khan Yunis city after an explosive device was detonated on an Israeli military patrol near the border between the occupied territories and the enclave.

 There were conflicting reports about the casualties of the border explosion.

Reuters and the Associated Press said that four Israeli troops had been wounded in the blast, while Lebanon’s Arabic-language al-Manar television network reported that one Israeli trooper had been killed and two others sustained serious injuries in the explosion.

There were no initial reports of injury in the Israeli tank fire against the Gaza Strip.

On December 29, 2017, Israeli military aircraft and battle tanks carried out a series of attacks on the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli assaults hit Hamas positions east of the Tuffah district of Gaza City.

The spokesman for the Gaza Ministry of Health, Ashraf al-Qidra, said in a statement that nobody had been injured by the Israeli fire.

The Israeli military frequently bombs the Gaza Strip, with civilians being the main target of such attacks.

Israel has launched several wars on the Palestinian coastal sliver, the last of which began in early July 2014. The military aggression, which ended on August 26, 2014, killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians. Over 11,100 others were also wounded in the war.

The Gaza Strip has been under an Israeli siege since June 2007. The blockade has caused a decline in the standards of living as well as unprecedented levels of unemployment and unrelenting poverty.

The Israeli regime denies about 1.8 million people in Gaza their basic rights, such as freedom of movement, jobs with proper wages as well as adequate healthcare and education.

Zionist entity flattened 6 EU-funded structures in West Bank in January, says UN

On the other hand,the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says Zionist authorities demolished six European Union-funded buildings in the occupied West Bank in January alone under the pretext of lack of building permit.

The UN body further said in its Friday report that all the six structures had been built in the so-called Area C, which constitutes about 61 percent of the entire West Bank and it is directly controlled by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT).

The so-called COGAT is a unit in the Israeli military that engages in coordinating civilian issues between the Israeli regime, the Israeli military, international organizations, diplomats and the Palestinian Authority. The report also said that at least 44 schools have pending demolition orders in the area.

The COGAT demands permits for new building projects, however, according to the NRC, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), an international organization that promotes and protects the rights of people affected by displacement, the majority of planning requests are firmly rejected, leaving international donors and Palestinians alike with no choice but to construct new buildings anyway.

In a separate report on Friday, the OCHA said that the Israeli authorities had razed or seized 25 structures in Area C and occupied East al-Quds on the grounds of lack of building permits, including a donor-funded school.

The UN body added that at least 33 Palestinians, including 18 children, had been displaced and another 135 had been otherwise affected as a result of the latest Israeli measures.

According to the OCHA, of the six demolished EU-funded structures, two were residential and four animal shelters, which had been constructed in the Palestinian Bedouin community of al Jiftlik Abu al Ajaj, in the central Jordan Valley. Another eight EU-funded structures received stop-work orders and faced imminent demolition on the ground they were being built without permit, it added.

In August last year, Israeli authorities destroyed or inflicted heavy damage on at least three educational facilities for Palestinian children in the Area C in the course of two weeks.

Children living in the area often must walk or travel long distances to reach their schools and are exposed to settler harassment or searches at checkpoints. These constraints negatively affect the quality of education in the area and increase the chances of early dropout.

About 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built illegally since the 1967 occupation of the Palestinian territories.

The continued expansion of Israeli settlements is one of the major obstacles to the establishment of peace in the Middle East.

In recent months, Tel Aviv has stepped up its settlement construction activities in the occupied Palestinian lands in a blatant violation ofinternational law and in defiance of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334.

European nations and the United Nations, among others, maintain their strong opposition to settlement building in the Palestinian territories.

PRESS T.V

R.S