Gaza – According to a BBC reporter, there is „panic, fear and chaos“ in the Gaza Strip after an overnight Israeli bombardment, which according to a number of sources was the heaviest since October 7, and after a new Israeli ground operation, which is also the largest since the Palestinian Hamas attack on Israel . After the internet and mobile service outages in most of the area since Friday evening, people have no news of their loved ones and ambulance drivers are only going to the wounded depending on where they hear the explosions. Some media have information thanks to satellite phones. Israeli shelling, along with the army’s ground operation, is concentrated in the north of the Gaza Strip, according to a BBC reporter on the ground, but rockets have also hit the south of the Strip.
„Hundreds of buildings and houses have been completely destroyed and thousands of other houses have been damaged,“ Mahmoud Bassal of the Gaza civil defense, which is controlled by the radical Hamas movement, told AFP. According to him, the intensive night bombardment „completely changed the landscape of Gaza and the northern areas of the strip“.
According to several testimonies cited by AFP, the heaviest Israeli bombings were concentrated around the Shifa hospital in Gaza and the so-called Indonesian hospital in Bayt Lahija in the north of the Gaza Strip, which was built thanks to donations from Indonesia. The airstrikes also left huge craters in completely broken streets, AFP reported.
A few hours before the massive shelling of the Gaza Strip began, the Israeli army accused Hamas on Friday evening of „waging war from the hospitals“, which Hamas denied. The army spokesman specifically mentioned the Shifa hospital in Gaza and said that Hamas has „command centers and hideouts“ there.
A BBC reporter in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis said there was „panic, fear and chaos“ in the area. After the interruption of communication links, people do not know what will happen next, whether the ground action of the Israeli army will not spread to the south. In previous days, the Israeli government called on the residents of the Gaza Strip to move from the north to the south, but Israeli shelling sometimes targets the southern area as well.
According to the BBC reporter, many Palestinians are trying in vain to connect with their loved ones. However, there is also a lack of telecommunication connections for rescuers. Ambulance drivers only go out depending on where they hear explosions. And there is „total chaos“ in the area, the BBC reporter described.
On the social network X, calls from a number of its users appeared today addressed to the owner of this platform, the American billionaire Elon Musk, to provide the Starlink Internet service owned by his company SpaceX to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. According to expert Mark Owen Jones from the University of Doha, Qatar, this is not possible. „First of all, there are no terminals for this service in Gaza, so even if Elon Musk wanted to provide Starlink, which he doesn’t want, how could the service work there?“ Jones told Al Jazeera television. He added that Israel controls what gets into Gaza. „Say Starlink would get there, how would it be fueled? There’s no fuel in Gaza right now,“ Jones said.
According to Jones, the communications blackout may harm the people of the Gaza Strip, because without information about the loss and suffering in the area, the solidarity of some with the civilians in the area may decrease. Over two million people live in the Gaza Strip, an area smaller than Prague, the vast majority of whom cannot leave the area under the years-long Israeli blockade.