News - Middle East: The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas resistance movement, says four Israeli troops were killed in an operation in the northern sector of the Gaza Strip. 

In a brief statement, Qassam Brigades said its fighters stabbed at close range an Israeli officer and three soldiers at the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday morning, resulting in their deaths.

They seized assault rifles and other weapons from the slain Israeli troops, it added. 

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the Qassam Brigade’s statement.

Qassam Brigades targets Israeli military base with kamikaze drone

Separately, the Brigades noted that its fighters targeted an Israeli military base with a Zouari kamikaze drone, named after a 49-year-old pro-Palestine Tunisian engineer and drone expert who was assassinated in a drive-by shooting widely attributed to the Mossad in his hometown of Sfax on December 15, 2016, in the southern part of the occupied territories.

The retaliatory operations came following another attack on Wednesday, when Hamas fighters killed five Israeli soldiers in central Jabalia, also at close range.

At least 16 Palestinians killed across Gaza Strip: Reports

Meanwhile, Israeli military forces killed at least 16 more people across Gaza, according to various media sources.

Israeli artillery fire killed at least six Palestinians on al-Nuzha Street in Jabalia al-Balad, northern Gaza, while at least one Palestinian was killed in Israeli attacks on a group of civilians in the Zeitoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza City.

At least three Palestinians were also killed in an Israeli air attack on Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp, according to the Wafa news agency.

Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Flood against the Israeli regime in response to the occupying entity’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.

The regime’s bloody onslaught on Gaza has so far killed 45,129 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 107,338 others, the Gaza Health Ministry said in a statement on Thursday. Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under rubble.

The deaths of 32 people were recorded in the last 24 hours.

Israel's military has systematically blocked the entry of lifesaving food, medicine, medical supplies, fuel, and tents into the besieged Palestinian territory since October 2023.

More than one year into the Tel Aviv regime's campaign of death and destruction, the territory's critical infrastructure such as water networks, sanitation facilities and bread mills has all been razed to the ground.

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