Israeli warplanes stage more heavy strikes across Gaza City

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli warplanes unleashed a new series of heavy airstrikes at several locations of Gaza City early Monday, hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled the fourth war with Gaza's Hamas rulers would rage on.

YOU DON'T SEE THIS DESTRUCTION IN ISRAEL, REGARDLESS OF NUMBER OF ROCKETS

THEY HAVE THE IRON DOOM  ANTI MISSLE DEFENSE MINIMAL DAMAGE FROM ROCKETS

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Explosions rocked the city from north to south for 10 minutes in an attack that was heavier, on a wider area and lasted longer than a series of air raids 24 hours earlier in which 42 Palestinians were killed — the deadliest single attack in the latest round of violence between Israel and the Hamas militant group that rules Gaza. The earlier Israeli airstrikes flattened three buildings.

There were no immediate reports of injuries, and in the predawn darkness there was little information on the extent of damage inflicted early Monday.

Local media reports said the main coastal road west of the city, security compounds and open spaces were hit in the latest raids. The power distribution company said airstrikes damaged a line feeding electricity from the only power plant to large parts of southern Gaza City.

In a televised address on Sunday, Netanyahu said Israel's attacks were continuing at “full-force” and would “take time.“ Israel “wants to levy a heavy price” on the Hamas militant group, he said, flanked by his defense minister and political rival, Benny Gantz, in a show of unity.

Hamas also pressed on, launching rockets from civilian areas in Gaza toward civilian areas in Israel. One slammed into a synagogue in the southern city of Ashkelon hours before evening services for the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, Israeli emergency services said. No injuries were reported.

In the Israeli air assault early Sunday, families were buried under piles of cement rubble and twisted rebar. A yellow canary lay crushed on the ground. Shards of glass and debris covered streets blocks away from the major downtown thoroughfare where the three buildings were hit over the course of five minutes around 1 a.m.

The hostilities have repeatedly escalated over the past week, marking the worst fighting in the territory that is home to 2 million Palestinians since Israel and Hamas' devastating 2014 war.

“I have not seen this level of destruction through my 14 years of work,” said Samir al-Khatib, an emergency rescue official in Gaza. “Not even in the 2014 war."

Rescuers furiously dug through the rubble using excavators and bulldozers amid clouds of heavy dust. One shouted, “Can you hear me?” into a hole. Minutes later, first responders pulled a survivor out. The Gaza Health Ministry said 16 women and 10 children were among those killed, with more than 50 people wounded.

Haya Abdelal, 21, who lives in a building next to one that was destroyed, said she was sleeping when the airstrikes sent her fleeing into the street. She accused Israel of not giving its usual warning to residents to leave before launching such an attack.

“We are tired,” she said, “We need a truce. We can’t bear it anymore.”

The Israeli army spokesperson’s office said the strike targeted Hamas “underground military infrastructure."

As a result of the strike, “the underground facility collapsed, causing the civilian houses' foundations above them to collapse as well, leading to unintended casualties,” it said.

Among those reported killed was Dr. Ayman Abu Al-Ouf, the head of the internal medicine department at Shifa Hospital and a senior member of the hospital's coronavirus management committee. Two of Abu Al-Ouf’s teenage children and two other family members were also buried under the rubble.

The death of the 51-year-old physician “was a huge loss at a very sensitive time,” said Mohammed Abu Selmia, the director of Shifa.

Gaza’s health care system, already gutted by an Israeli and Egyptian blockade imposed in 2007 after Hamas seized power from rival Palestinian forces, had been struggling with a surge in coronavirus infections even before the latest conflict.

Israel's airstrikes have leveled a number of Gaza City’s tallest buildings, which Israel alleges contained Hamas military infrastructure. Among them was the building housing The Associated Press Gaza office and those of other media outlets.

Sally Buzbee, the AP's executive editor, called for an independent investigation into the airstrike that destroyed the AP office on Saturday.

Netanyahu alleged that Hamas military intelligence was operating inside the building and said Sunday any evidence would be shared through intelligence channels. Neither the White House nor the State Department would say if any had been seen.

“It’s a perfectly legitimate target,” Netanyahu told CBS’s “Face the Nation."

Asked if he had provided any evidence of Hamas’ presence in the building in a call Saturday with U.S. President Joe Biden, Netanyahu said: “We pass it through our intelligence people.”

Buzbee called for any such evidence to be laid out. “We are in a conflict situation,” Buzbee said. “We do not take sides in that conflict. We heard Israelis say they have evidence; we don’t know what that evidence is.”

Meanwhile, media watchdog Reporters Without Borders asked the International Criminal Court on Sunday to investigate Israel’s bombing of the AP building and others housing media organizations as a possible war crime.

The Paris-based group said in a letter to the court’s chief prosecutor that the offices of 23 international and local media organizations have been destroyed over the past six days. It said the attacks serve “to reduce, if not neutralize, the media’s capacity to inform the public.”

The AP had operated from the building for 15 years, including through three previous wars between Israel and Hamas. The news agency’s cameras, operating from its top floor office and roof terrace, offered 24-hour live shots as militant rockets arched toward Israel and Israeli airstrikes hammered the city and its surroundings.

“We think it’s appropriate at this point for there to be an independent look at what happened yesterday — an independent investigation,” Buzbee said.

The latest outbreak of violence began in east Jerusalem last month, when Palestinians clashed with police in response to Israeli police tactics during Ramadan and the threatened eviction of dozens of Palestinian families by Jewish settlers. A focus of the clashes was the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a frequent flashpoint located on a hilltop compound revered by both Muslims and Jews.

Hamas began firing rockets toward Jerusalem on Monday, triggering the Israeli assault on Gaza.

At least 188 Palestinians have been killed in hundreds of airstrikes in Gaza, including 55 children and 33 women, with 1,230 people wounded. Eight people in Israel have been killed in some of the 3,100 rocket attacks launched from Gaza, including a 5-year-old boy and a soldier.

Hamas and the Islamic Jihad militant group have acknowledged 20 fighters killed in the fighting. Israel says the real number is far higher and has released the names and photos of two dozen alleged operatives it says were “eliminated.”

The assault has displaced some 34,000 Palestinians from their homes, U.N. Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland told an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, where eight foreign ministers spoke about the conflict.

Efforts by China, Norway and Tunisia to get the U.N. body to issue a statement, including a call for the cessation of hostilities, have been blocked by the United States, which, according to diplomats, is concerned it could interfere with diplomatic efforts to stop the violence.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Al-Malki urged the Security Council to take action to end Israeli attacks. Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, urged the council to condemn Hamas' “indiscriminate and unprovoked attacks.”

The turmoil has also fueled protests in the occupied West Bank and stoked violence within Israel between its Jewish and Arab citizens, with clashes and vigilante attacks on people and property.

On Sunday, a driver rammed into an Israeli checkpoint in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where Palestinian families have been threatened with eviction , injuring six officers before police shot and killed the attacker, Israeli police said.

The violence also sparked pro-Palestinian protests in cities across Europe and the United States.

Israel appears to have stepped up strikes in recent days to inflict as much damage as possible on Hamas as international mediators work to end the fighting and stave off an Israeli ground invasion in Gaza.

The Israeli military said it destroyed the home Sunday of Gaza’s top Hamas leader, Yahiyeh Sinwar, in the southern town of Khan Younis. It was the third such attack in the last two days on the homes of senior Hamas leaders, who have gone underground.

___

Nessman reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writers Samy Magdy in Cairo, Joseph Krauss and Isaac Scharf in Jerusalem, Edie Lederer at the United Nations and Bassem Mroue in Beirut contributed.

Fares Akram And Ravi Nessman, The Associated Press

PHOTOS (EXCERPT)

61 SLIDES © BASHAR TALEB, AFP via Getty Images

Melting ice in Antarctica could trigger chain reactions, bringing monsoon rains to the ice cap, study says

By Allison Chinchar, CNN Meteorologist 

In an ever-warming climate, ripple effects or chain reactions could lead to altered weather patterns across the globe thanks to a melting Antarctic ice sheet, a new study says.

 Alessandro Dahan/Getty Images This small lake was formed by melting ice. In the background are the ice sheets on a hill next to Comandante Ferraz Station, on January 5, 2020, in King George Island, Antarctica.

The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, found that as Earth continues to heat up, the land underneath the Antarctic ice sheet will become more exposed. As a result of that process, wind patterns will shift, and rainfall will increase over Antarctica, which could trigger processes that speed up ice loss.

"We found that ice sheet retreat exposing previously ice-covered land led to big increases in rainfall, which through a feedback mechanism dramatically warms the ocean," Catherine Bradshaw, senior scientist at the UK Met Office and lecturer at the University of Exeter told CNN.

"This feedback mechanism could potentially trigger additional processes that accelerate ice loss."

The joint study is based on combining climate modeling and data comparisons from the Middle Miocene epoch (13-17 million years ago).

Why do we care about something that happened more than 13 million years ago? Because carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures during the Middle Miocene were similar to those Earth is forecast to reach by the end of this century.

When it rains it pours

"With the big ice sheet on Antarctica like we have today, the predominant winds are known as katabatic winds, and these go from the land to the sea," Bradshaw told CNN. "They originate from the ice sheet where it is very high, very cold and very dry -- in fact Antarctica receives only a few inches of snowfall a year and is so dry it is classified as a desert."

Bradshaw cautions that those winds could actually reverse -- blowing instead from the cooler sea to the warmer, drier land -- if Antarctica continues to warm. Generating the same results we see from daily sea breezes as well as seasonal monsoon winds that occur around the world.

A monsoon is simply a seasonal reversal of wind direction which results in changes in precipitation for a specific region of the globe. For Antarctica, this means an increase in rain.

"The surface of the Antarctic ice sheet is very bright, and it reflects some 50-80% of the sunlight that hits it. Where the ice sheet retreats and exposes the darker land surface underneath, this ground is much less reflective and so absorbs more sunlight, which warms it up," Bradshaw told CNN.

Bradshaw explained that ice-free ground at the coast warms up more than the surrounding sea surface which in turn causes the change in wind direction. Similar to the seas breezes Florida experiences, these winds can bring in moisture from the surrounding ocean that can dramatically increase rainfall.

"What happens to an ice sheet when rainfall increases depends on where the rain falls and whether it is cold enough to fall as snow instead of rain." said Bradshaw.

"If the temperatures are warm enough for the moisture to fall as rain over the ice-free area, this could trigger processes that can accelerate ice loss. Conversely, if the temperatures are cold enough for the moisture to fall as snow over the ice sheet, this can cause ice growth."

As the Earth continues to warm, scientists may be able to learn from monsoonal regions of the world about how to prevent a collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet. While that may sound a little far-fetched, this new research shows it may have actually happened in the past when the Antarctic ice sheet was even more unstable.

"Essentially, if more land is exposed in Antarctica, it becomes harder for a large ice sheet to reform, and without (favorable) orbital positions in the Middle Miocene playing a role, perhaps the ice sheet would have collapsed at that time," Bradshaw said in a news release.

While the study suggests that the Antarctic ice sheet was capable of major advance and retreat across the continent during the Middle Miocene, Dr Bradshaw emphasizes that conditions now are not identical to those millions of years ago.

"It is important to stress that there were many important processes not included in our study, which, considering our findings, require additional research to establish exactly what the implications are for the future," Bradshaw told CNN. "This is the work that I intend to do next, but have not yet started."

Walking on thin ice

Additional rainfall on the Antarctic continent isn't just about the local impacts, but also global ones -- since that new rainfall would eventually cause more freshwater to end up in the surrounding oceans in turn causing sea levels to rise.

"Rain ultimately flows back to sea, and because it is freshwater rather than saltwater, it is less dense than the seawater it is draining into," Bradshaw told CNN. "This means it can form a cap at the surface rather than sinking and circulating."

This is important because you have now essentially created a separation point between the deep ocean and the surface of the ocean which leads the deep waters to warm up.

"Since much of the West Antarctic ice sheet in particular is grounded beneath the sea surface, warmer waters can interact with the ice sheet from beneath, " said Bradshaw.

"If the surface of the ice sheet is melting it can form meltwater lakes that rainfall can add to. Meltwater lakes tend to be blue rather than white, making them darker than the ice underneath and therefore they absorb more sunlight, which makes them warmer."

This can create a domino effect in which these darker, warmer waters could cause the ice sheet to melt from the inside out. So the worst-case scenario now is the ice sheet not only melting from within -- but also shrinking at the coastline.

"Near the coast, the ice flows faster in ice streams, glaciers and ice shelves and is lost to the ocean as either meltwater or icebergs," Bradshaw told CNN. "Without new snowfall to replace the ice that is constantly being lost, the ice sheet will lose mass."

Even though this study focused mainly on Antarctica there have also been noticeable changes in ocean temperatures and salinity not only in the Southern Hemisphere but also in the Northern Hemisphere due to melting from Greenland's ice sheet.

This dramatic melting of the world's ice sheets could lead to dramatic changes in weather patterns. Exactly how stable or unstable the Antarctic ice sheet is, is still not fully determined. However one thing is certain and that is that the ice is constantly moving.

© Mario Tama/Getty Images The western edge of the giant iceberg A-68, calved from the Larsen C ice shelf, is seen from NASA's Operation IceBridge research aircraft, near the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula region, in 2017.