JERUSALEM – The fighting between Israelis and Palestinians wound across multiple fronts on Saturday as Israel destroyed a skyscraper in Gaza that housed the offices of two major international media outlets. Thousands of Palestinians fled their homes. Hamas militants in Gaza fired further rocket barriers at the USA Protests in the occupied West Bank broke out again in the Tel Aviv region.
The violence continued amid heightened American efforts to broker a ceasefire when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke to Israeli and Palestinian leaders and an American envoy, Hady Amr, landed in Israel for two days to meet with Israeli and Arab colleagues speak . They joined efforts by representatives of Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations to obtain a halt to the fighting.
On Saturday evening, however, those efforts showed no signs of success: the fighting is the most intense since 2014 and has taken on a rare complexity due to its spread across Israel and the Occupied Territories.
According to Palestinian officials, the death toll is overwhelmingly higher in Gaza, where at least 145 people have been killed since Monday. But Israeli cities have been rioted for days amid mob attacks by both Jews and Arabs. And they were attacked by more than 2,800 rockets from Gaza, 90 percent of which were intercepted by the Iron Dome, an anti-missile detection system partly funded by the US. According to the Israeli government, ten Israeli residents and two Israeli soldiers were killed.
The Israeli army said it had carried out more than 670 of its own strikes in Gaza by Saturday evening. One of the most recent was the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, where at least 10 members of the same extended family, including eight children, were killed early Saturday morning, according to Palestinian officials and local news.
Hundreds of thousands of Gaza residents are descended from Palestinians who fled their homes in what is now Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Their cities are still known as refugee camps, although today they resemble small suburbs.
Mohammed al-Hadidi, the father of four of the children killed, said his family went to the camp to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, an Islamic festival. His wife, her brother’s four children, and her sister-in-law were also among the dead, and only a five-month-old boy, Omar, was pulled alive from the rubble.
“They slept in their homes,” said al-Hadidi in an interview with Shehab, a news agency affiliated with Hamas. “They didn’t hold guns, they didn’t fire missiles, and they didn’t harm anyone.”
Later, as rescue teams made their way through the rubble, Mr. al-Hadidi could be seen howling in the ruins where the bodies of his children had been found. In a video of the scene posted on social media, he swayed while several other men held him up.
The Israeli army said it had “attacked a number of senior Hamas terrorist organization officials in an apartment used as a terrorist infrastructure in the area of the al-Shati refugee camp,” but did not provide any further information. The Palestinian militant group Hamas controls the Gaza Strip.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Lior Haiat, said Israel had done everything possible to minimize civilian casualties and that it was Hamas that fired indiscriminately at Israeli civilians. “Each of these rockets that are fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel is actually a terrorist attack,” said Haiat. “But not only that – each of these missiles is also a war crime.”
Hamas and its allies in Gaza returned fire with rocket fire over central Israel in the early afternoon and sent sunbathers sprinting from Tel Aviv’s beaches towards the bomb shelter.
Most of the rockets were intercepted by the Iron Cathedral. At least one landed in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv, and killed one person, Israeli media reported. Another missile fell near an Ikea store south of Tel Aviv, but left no injuries.
On Saturday, the United Nations announced that more than 17,000 Gaza residents had evacuated their homes and were seeking refuge in 41 United Nations-run schools across Gaza, only some of which were provided with supplies such as blankets to house displaced persons.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Updated
May 15, 2021, 3:38 p.m. ET
Across the coast, electricity had dropped to an average of six to eight hours a day, and in some areas less than four, affecting medical centers, water supplies and sewage treatment plants in the Gaza Strip, according to the United Nations. For the third day in a row, the running water for about 230,000 Gazans was shaky, and for the fifth day in a row no desalination plant was in operation, disrupting drinking water for a quarter of a million people.
On Saturday afternoon, the Israeli Air Force also destroyed two towers in Gaza City, one of which housed the local offices of the American news service The Associated Press and the Qatar-based television channel Al Jazeera. Once again, Israeli officials claimed the target was militant infrastructure.
The Israeli army first called the building’s owner, Jawad Mahdi, and gave him an hour to evacuate his tenants.
In the minutes before the airstrike, Mr. Mahdi was filmed asking the Israeli army to give four journalists who had filmed Mohammed al-Hadidi in the hospital an additional 10 minutes to collect their belongings.
“There won’t be 10 minutes,” replied the Israeli soldier.
Mr. Mahdi tried again. “In the time we’ve been talking for the last 10 minutes, if you just let us go, the journalists could have gone in and picked up their gear and come back.”
Then he gave up. “It’s okay, you can do what you want,” said Mr. Mahdi. “Our life’s work is gone, our lives, our memories that you just wasted.”
“There is a God who is greater than you,” he later added.
Minutes later the building was destroyed and shrouded in a cloud of black smoke.
The Associated Press described the attack as “an incredibly worrying development,” adding, “We narrowly avoided a terrible loss of life. A dozen AP journalists and freelancers were in the building and thankfully we were able to evacuate them on time. “
The attack came just days after the home of an AP correspondent in Gaza, Fares Akram, and the offices of several Palestinian news agencies were also bombed.
Gary Pruitt, the chief executive of the AP, said he was “shocked and appalled” by the destruction of the building.
On Saturday, a White House spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said on Twitter that the United States had “communicated directly to Israelis that keeping journalists and independent media safe is a priority.”
After the air strike, journalists from other news organizations gathered near the ruins of the tower to speak to the Associated Press and Al Jazeera journalists who had lost their offices.
“This is clearly to silence the truth and the voices of journalists,” said Heba Akila, an Al Jazeera journalist who was broadcasting from the tower at the time of the warning call.
On Friday, there were renewed clashes between Arab and Jewish citizens in Israeli cities overnight. Two Palestinian citizens of Israel were injured in an arson attack on their home in Jaffa, a mixed Arab-Jewish city at the heart of Arab life in the Middle East, before most Arab residents fled to Gaza and other parts of the region in 1948.
For the Palestinians, the attack and the situation in general had a special resonance on Saturday: it was Nakba Day, an annual commemoration of the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948. In Ramallah, the administrative center of the Occupied West Bank, the sound of 73 sounded A siren for seconds to mark the 73 years since the diversion.
Demonstrations and clashes continued in the West Bank. This shows how widespread the fighting has become since Hamas fired its first rockets shortly after 6 p.m. on Monday.
A Palestinian militant group in Lebanon also fired rockets at Israel this week, while protesters from Lebanon also briefly invaded northern Israel and asked the Israeli army to shoot them.
Masses of Jordanian citizens, many of whom are of Palestinian origin, have also gathered on the Israeli border to protest the strikes against Gaza.
Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem and Vivian Yee from Cairo. The coverage was provided by Iyad Abuhweila in Gaza City; Carol Sutherland in Moshav Ben Ami, Israel; Irit Pazner Garshowitz in Tsur Hadasa, Israel; Gabby Sobelman in Rehovot, Israel; and Adam Rasgon in Los Angeles.
