18 kids die in Israeli strikes

Attacks ahead of IDF assault

- CHRIS HUGHES

AIRSTRIKES on the Gazan city of Rafah killed 18 children at the weekend, say health officials.

The deaths were reported as Israeli forces prepare to launch an assault on the Gaza Strip's southern enclave.

The Israeli missiles that hit Rafah on Saturday night killed 22 members of two families, 18 of them children.

Among the dead was a father along with his three-year-old child and wife, who was pregnant. The baby was saved, said the Kuwait Hospital.

The strikes followed one on the city the previous night that killed nine people, including six children.

They came after the US Congress voted in favour of a foreign aid package on Saturday night that will include £3.2bn for replenishing Israeli missile stocks and £7billion in humanitarian aid for Gaza.

Rafah has suffered near-daily raids and Israel plans to defy Western warnings and launch a ground invasion too.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: "In the coming days, we will increase the political and military pressure on Hamas because this is the only way to bring back our hostages." Pressures on Netanyahu include protests by Israelis blaming his government for failing to save hostages taken by Gaza's Hamas in its October 7 raid.

But the US has led calls for Israel not to attack Rafah, where more than half of Gaza's 2.3 million people are living.

We saw protests mobbing a road junction on the way back from northern Israel, locals appealing for elections and highlighting government failures to secure hostage releases.

Yalon Pikman, 58, who attended a march of hundreds of thousands in Tel Aviv, said: "We're here to protest against this government that keeps dragging us down, month after month.

"We keep going down in a spiral."

Most Israelis we spoke to objected to the use of Gazan health officials' figures for Palestinian death tolls.