The Gaza Strip has been pounded by relentless airstrikes since Hamas militants launched a full-scale assault on southern Israel Saturday, leaving at least 1,200 people dead in the Jewish state, including at least 25 Americans.
The aerial assault by the Israel Defense Forces has been unprecedented in scale, with the IDF saying it has struck at least 2,000 sites in the besieged Palestinian enclave. As of Thursday, more than 1,350 people had been killed in Gaza, according to the region's Heath Ministry.
Photographs from Gaza show harrowing scenes, including entire residential blocks reduced to craters in the ground and parents mourning dead children in overcrowded hospitals. Maps, aerial videos and satellite images reveal the scale of destruction.
Israel has said its bombardments are targeting weapons storage centers and infrastructure used or occupied by Hamas militants, but the United Nations reports that at least a dozen health facilities in the territory have also been hit in the strikes.
At least 450 targets in the Al Furkan neighborhood of Gaza City have been struck, the IDF said, along with another 70 in Gaza City's Al-Daraj neighborhood.
The IDF released aerial video Wednesday of an airstrike on the Islamic University in Gaza, which it said was being used by Hamas for weapons development and militant training. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also tweeted video of the IDF bombings.
Israel has long accused Hamas of positioning weapons and fighters amid the civilian population in Gaza, including in schools and medical facilities.
מטוסי קרב תקפו לפני זמן קצר את האוניברסיטה האסלאמית שמשמשת כמוקד כח מדיני וצבאי חשוב של ארגון הטרור חמאס ברצועת עזה ומוסד הדרכה לפיתוח וייצור אמצעי לחימה.
— צבא ההגנה לישראל (@idfonline) October 11, 2023
צה"ל ממשיך בגלי תקיפה נרחבים ברצועה גם בשעה זו pic.twitter.com/NaRPoOepfM
U.S. space technology company Maxar on Tuesday released satellite imagery that shows entire areas reduced to rubble.
The charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said Wednesday that all of the patients it treated at its Gaza City clinic were aged between 10 and 14.
"This is because the majority of the injured in Gaza are women and children, since they are the ones who are most often in the houses that get destroyed in the airstrikes," said Ayman Al-Djaroucha, MSF deputy project coordinator in Gaza.
The median age of the Gazan population is 18, with 65% of the region's population under the age of 24.
Palestinian civilians "are not our targets," IDF spokesperson Maj. Libby Weiss told CBS News Wednesday.
"Loss of life here is tragic," Weiss said. "But again, we must make sure that Hamas cannot launch massacres and slaughter civilians as they did this past weekend. It is just a reality with which we cannot live any more."
Many of Gaza's residents have been unable to escape the bombardments, Palestinian journalist Hassan Jaber told CBS News. "There is no safe place in Gaza," he said, adding that many Palestinians do not have access to bomb shelters and some could face starvation within days.
"There are no shelters or bunkers or safe routes or safe zones in Gaza," Gaza resident Omar Ghraieb told CBS News over the phone on Tuesday.
"We are a family of five people and these unfortunate events unfolded so very fast... We didn't really have enough time to actually stock up enough on food, medicine and water," Ghraeib said. "We are having three to four hours of electricity every 24 hours."
The United Nations estimated early Thursday that about 338,000 Gaza residents had been displaced by the conflict since Saturday, creating a humanitarian crisis. A panel of independent U.N. experts has said the aerial assault amounts to "collective punishment" of civilians, which they call "a war crime."
So far, no humanitarian corridor has been established for civilians to escape Gaza, or for desperately needed aid supplies to get in.
Hamas controls the Gaza Strip, a narrow enclave that runs for about 25 miles along a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea between Israel and Egypt, which has been blockaded by the Israeli military since Hamas took over in 2007. Gaza is one of the most densely populated places in the world and houses about 2.3 million people.
"They are all victims," one woman, who had taken shelter in the grounds of a Gaza hospital, told CBS News Wednesday. "They're all women, children. What did they do?"
— Holly Williams contributed to this report.
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