TEHRAN- As people around the world enjoyed spectacular fireworks displays that lit up the skyline of major cities to welcome 2024, the Israeli regime pushed ahead with its campaign of targeting Palestinian civilians at a hugely indiscriminate rate. 

The Israeli military's war crimes against Palestinian civilians were firmly put at the back of the minds of countries across the globe, who went ahead with their celebrations to mark the beginning of 2024. 

This is while in Gaza, where there is no skyline and buildings reduced to rubble by the Israeli army, people were struggling to pull women and children out of residential buildings that the regime's military had bombed. 

This has set the tone of 2024 for Gaza, which finds itself isolated from the world. 

Many of the regime's allies, in particular the United States and others, have greenlighted the occupation regime to continue its massacres against women and children in the year 2024 by attacking them at shelters. 

As the world focused on celebrating, the Israeli occupation’s army waged fresh ground offensives in several areas in the Gaza Strip. 

The regime's warships are now participating in the latest offensives against Gaza by firing from the sea and adding to the widespread Israeli death and destruction campaign inside the heavily populated yet tiny territory.  

With people distracted by their government's eye-catching overnight fireworks display to mark the new year, the Israeli regime killed at least 100 Palestinians and injured many others, in a continuation of its pattern of targeting mainly women and children. 

At the start of the year, Khan Younis in the south of Gaza and other areas in the central part of the enclave have reportedly been chosen by the regime to hit the hardest. 

Footage from regional media showed traumatized children covered with blood, tears, and the remnants of destroyed concrete being rushed to hospitals as they cried for help. 

Hospitals in Gaza are overcrowded and medical care is limited to simple supplies (as a result of the Israeli regime's strict entry of food, water and medicine into Gaza), which explains why many children were being treated on the floor. 

Other footage showed men and women, also traumatized, with fear and paranoia clearly marked on their faces searching for their own children. 

Local sources also reported that the Israeli military carried out horrific crimes inside the new areas its forces have invaded, including field executions of civilians, raiding local businesses, looting and destroying homes and facilities, and besieging thousands of Gazans in their homes while depriving them of food, water or health services. 

This was the same theme of 2023 that Palestinians in Gaza are set to endure in 2024. 

Reports emerged of more fatalities and injuries sustained among Palestinian women and children in their homes that were attacked as the clock struck midnight, while dead bodies spent the start of the new year on the streets of Gaza as medical teams were unable to reach them under the indiscriminate Israeli line of fire.  

The occupation’s forces also carried out random arrests against civilians. Also, the army's widespread harassment and torture of Gazans has been reported again as the clock turned to 2024 in occupied al-Quds (Jerusalem) time. 

The Palestinian death toll is approaching 22,000. The number of injuries is close to 57,000, but UN experts say this tally, by the Gaza health ministry, is lower than the real figures. 70 percent of the casualty figures are women and children.

Thousands of others have been declared missing by the Gaza health ministry, presumably under the rubble. 

The regime's indiscriminate bombardment has left the majority of the residents in the Gaza Strip displaced, in what is another war crime. 

The Israeli goals, in its war on Gaza, of "eliminating Hamas" and bringing back its captives, held by the Palestinian resistance, alive, is nowhere close to being accomplished. 

Experts point out that it will never be accomplished either even if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right extremist ministers carry on their war on the people of Gaza "for many months". 

The Israeli military is using up too much firepower to kill Palestinian civilians, more so than the regime and its staunchest ally the United States can supply for the Israeli army. 

In a desperate attempt on Friday, the administration of President Joe Biden approved a $150 million transfer of unknown military equipment to Israel, bypassing Congress to do so for the second time in a month. 

The U.S. State Department cited the "urgency" of "Israel’s (offensive) need". 

The regime's leaders have repeatedly claimed they are closing in on the leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions. 

But the occupation army has not managed to kill or capture any of the top resistance leaders on the Israeli hit list and has failed to explain how they believe they can "wipe out" Hamas or other Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza with the political and ideological connections to Hamas. 
In another sign of the Israeli army's fatigue in fighting on the ground in Gaza, the regime says it will withdraw more troops from the coastal enclave. 

Marking a New Year for the Israeli settlers, Hamas fired a barrage of rockets at Tel Aviv, three months after the Israeli war on Gaza started. The firing of rockets marked a show of strength that the resistance movement has the same prowess that it enjoyed before the regime waged its mad war on Gaza on October 7, 2023. 

Hamas's armed wing, the al-Qassam brigades, said it had used M90 long-range missiles to target central and southern areas of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories in "response to the massacres of civilians by the Zionist enemy".