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Gaza death toll climbs to 83

The death toll from more than two days of Israeli strikes on Gaza has risen to 83, the health ministry controlled by the territory’s Islamist rulers Hamas said Thursday.

The dead included 17 children, while 487 people have been wounded, the ministry said.

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The Israeli military said it had struck Gaza more than 600 times since Monday evening while Hamas has fired more than 1,600 rockets towards Israel.

On Thursday, Israel faced an escalating conflict on two fronts, scrambling to quell riots between Arabs and Jews on its own streets after days of exchanging deadly fire with Islamist militants in Gaza.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz ordered a “massive reinforcement” of security forces to quell mob violence across the country, where police stations have been attacked and people savagely beaten on both sides.

Despite global alarm and diplomatic efforts to halt the spiralling violence, which US President Joe Biden said he hoped would end “sooner than later,” hundreds of rockets again tore through the skies over the Gaza Strip overnight.

Israel’s air force launched multiple strikes with fighter jets, targeting what it described as locations linked to Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza.

Israel’s civil aviation authority said it had diverted all incoming passenger flights headed for Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport to Ramon airport in the south, as air raid warnings once more went off across Israel.

In southern Israel, seven people were killed, including one six-year-old, after a rocket struck a family home, the United Hatzalah volunteer rescue service said.

Recent days have seen the most intense hostilities in seven years between Israel and Gaza’s armed groups, triggered by weekend unrest at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque compound, which is sacred to both Muslims and Jews.

The unrest has been driven by anger over the looming evictions of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of east Jerusalem. 

Coinciding with the aerial bombardments is surging violence between Arabs and Jews inside Israel.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told AFP that violence was at a nadir not seen for decades and that police were “literally preventing pogroms from taking place.”

Hundreds were protesting in the Arab town of Kafr Kassem in central Israel, burning tires and torching police vehicles, he said.

He added that nearly 1,000 border police were called in to quell the violence, and that more than 400 people had been arrested. 

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