Ramat Hasharon: Israeli strikes on northern Gaza have killed at least 22 people, mostly women and children, Palestinian officials said Sunday, as the Israeli offensive in the hard-hit and isolated north entered a third week and aid groups described a humanitarian catastrophe. Israel said it targeted militants.
In a separate development, a truck rammed into a bus stop near the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, wounding 35 people, according to first responders. Israeli police described it as an attack and said the assailant was an Arab citizen of Israel. The ramming occurred near the headquarters of Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Iran’s supreme leader, meanwhile, said Israeli strikes on the country over the weekend “should not be exaggerated nor downplayed,” while stopping short of calling for retaliation, suggesting Iran is carefully weighing its response to the attack.
On Saturday, Israeli warplanes attacked military targets in Iran in response to an Iranian ballistic missile attack earlier this month.
The exchange of fire has raised fears of an all-out regional war pitting Israel and the United States against Iran and its militant proxies, which include Hamas and the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon, where Israel launched a ground invasion earlier this month after nearly a year of lower-level conflict.
The Israeli military said Sunday that four soldiers, including a military rabbi, were killed in fighting in southern Lebanon, without providing details about the circumstances. It said five other personnel were severely wounded. An explosive drone and a projectile fired from Lebanon wounded five people in Israel on Sunday, authorites said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that the strikes “severely harmed” Iran and achieved all of Israel’s goals.
“The air force struck throughout Iran. We severely harmed Iran’s defense capabilities and its ability to produce missiles that are aimed toward us,” Netanyahu said in his first public comments on the strikes.
Satellite images showed damage to two secretive Iranian military bases, one linked to work on nuclear weapons that Western intelligence agencies and nuclear inspectors say was discontinued in 2003 and another linked to Iran’s ballistic missile program.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s 85-year-old supreme leader, said “it is up to the authorities to determine how to convey the power and will of the Iranian people to the Israeli regime and to take actions that serve the interests of this nation and country.”
Khamenei would make any final decision on how Iran responds.
Meanwhile in the city of Ramat Hasharon, northeast of Tel Aviv, the truck slammed into a bus at a stop as Israelis were returning to work after a weeklong holiday, leaving some people stuck under the vehicles. In addition to being near the Mossad headquarters and a military base, the bus stop is also close to a central highway junction.
Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said six of the wounded were in serious condition.
Asi Aharoni, an Israeli police spokesperson, told reporters that the attacker had been “neutralized,” without saying if the assailant was dead.
Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad militant group praised the suspected attack but did not claim it.
Palestinians have carried out scores of stabbings, shootings and car-ramming attacks over the years. Tensions have soared since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, as Israel has carried out regular military raids into the occupied West Bank that have left hundreds dead. Most appear to have been militants killed during shootouts with Israeli forces, but Palestinians taking part in violent protests and civilian bystanders have also been killed.
The military said there was another attack near a checkpoint in the West Bank, in which a suspect tried to ram soldiers with his vehicle and then tried to stab them before being killed. No soldiers were wounded, it said.
