GAZA CITY
Fifty-five Palestinian homes have been leveled in a series of Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip over the past two days, the Gaza Interior Ministry said Wednesday.
It added in a statement that Israel had launched around 500 strikes in the last 48 hours, some 85 percent of which had targeted Gaza's energy and communications infrastructure.
The strikes, it added, had also destroyed large swathes of agricultural land.
The Interior Ministry went on to note that thousands of apartment units had also been damaged by unrelenting Israeli airstrikes.
The Israeli army said Tuesday that its air and naval forces had struck scores of sites across the Gaza Strip overnight, while ground troops remain massed on the strip's borders in advance of a possible ground assault.
Gaza-based resistance factions, for their part, continued to fire rockets into Israel on Wednesday in response to ongoing Israeli airstrikes.
The latest escalations follow the disappearance and death of three teenage Jewish settlers in the West Bank last month and the subsequent murder by Jewish extremists of a 16-year-old Palestinian boy.
By Ola Attalah
Anadolu Agency website contains only a portion of the news stories offered to subscribers in the AA News Broadcasting System (HAS), and in summarized form. Please contact us for subscription options.
