AhlulBayt News Agency: The Israeli regime’s military has confirmed the death of one of its forces in Friday’s heavy armed clashes with Palestinian resistance groups in the northern Gaza Strip.
The Israeli media reports cited the occupation military as saying that Sgt. Ben Avishay had been killed in fierce exchanges of fire with Palestinians in east of the city of Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday.
The Israeli military described the fighting in Jabalia and its refugee camp as "perhaps the fiercest we have encountered" in the area since the start of the offensive in the Gaza Strip in October last year.
Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, earlier announced that its fighters “were able to snipe an Israeli soldier east of the city of Jabalia.”
Stressing that various areas of the Gaza Strip were witnessing fierce fighting, the al-Qassam Brigades said its fighters had infiltrated behind enemy lines east of the Jabalia refugee camp and targeted a tank and a troop carrier in the area, killing and wounding an unspecified number of its crews.
The occupation army has acknowledged the death of five of its soldiers and the injury of more than 40 others over the past two days as fighting with resistance groups intensified in the north and south of the Gaza Strip amid Israel's initiation of the large-scale ground invasion of Rafah.
Data announced by the occupation army indicates that 626 Israeli officers and soldiers have been killed and 1,723 others injured in Gaza since October last year, with Tel Aviv facing widespread criticism of concealing a much larger toll of its deaths and injuries.
Civilians killed in Israeli aggression on Jabalia
Meanwhile, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA cited local sources as saying that three civilians were killed on Friday afternoon in an Israeli airstrike on Jabalia.
WAFA said three civilians were killed and several others were injured when Israeli warplanes targeted a group of civilians in the northern Gaza Strip city.
Israel unleashed the Gaza onslaught on October 7 after Hamas-led Palestinian resistance groups carried out Operation al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The Tel Aviv regime has so far killed at least 35,303 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 79,261 others, according to the Gaza-based health ministry update on Friday.
The occupying entity has also imposed a
“complete siege” on the territory, cutting off fuel, electricity, food,
and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.
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