Over 50 killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza, including children

Ahram Online , Saturday 19 Oct 2024

More than 50 people have been killed in several Israeli strikes in Gaza, including children, in less than 24 hours, according to hospital officials and an Associated Press reporter.

Gaza
Mourners attend the funeral of ten-year-old Sama al-Debs, who was killed during an Israeli army assault in the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip on October 18, 2024. AFP

 

At least 10 people were killed, including two children, when a house was hit in the town of Zawayda, in central Gaza, according to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital where the casualties were taken.

An AP reporter counted the bodies at the hospital. Another strike killed 11 people, all from the same family, in the Maghazi refugee camp, according to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where they were taken. An Associated Press journalist counted the bodies at the hospital.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said in a statement that Israeli strikes also hit the upper floors of the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya, and that forces opened fire at the hospital’s building and its courtyard.

"Israeli tanks have completely surrounded the hospital, cut off electricity and shelled the hospital, targeting the second and third floors with artillery," the facility's director, Marwan Sultan told AFP.

In a statement, Gaza's health ministry also said Israel had targeted the upper floors, adding there were "more than 40 patients and wounded in addition to the medical staff" present.

"Heavy gunfire" towards the hospital and its courtyard had sparked a "state of great panic" among patients and staff, it added.

At Al-Awda hospital in Jabaliya, strikes hit the building’s top floors, injuring several staff members, the hospital said in a statement.

Overnight Friday, at least three houses were struck in northern Gaza killing at least 33 people, more than half of them women and children, said Fares Abu Hamza, head of the health ministry’s ambulance and emergency service. The homes were hit in Jabaliya and at least 80 people were injured.

Agency spokesman Mahmoud Bassal announced "33 deaths and dozens of wounded" while a medical source at the Al-Awda hospital told AFP earlier that it had registered 22 dead and 70 wounded after the strike on the Tal al-Zaatar camp for Palestinian refugees.

 

 

A Ministry of Health official told Al Jazeera that "dozens of martyrs’ bodies are scattered in the streets of Jabalia."

On 6 October, Israel launched a new assault in northern Gaza, including around Jabalia, killing scores of people in one of the areas hit hardest by Israel's year-long deadly war.

The UN humanitarian affairs agency said Friday night that it continued "to sound the alarm about the increasingly dire and dangerous situation that civilians in northern Gaza are facing. Families there are trying to survive in atrocious conditions, under heavy bombardment."

One of the 21 women killed in the Israeli attacks on Jabalia was Palestinian artist Mahasen Al Khatib.

 

Doctors volunteering in north Gaza say the Israeli siege has made the situation so dire that "some days, the most you could do was hold people’s hand and watch them die."

"It never ends ... Every day you wake up to more and more of it, and that's just what makes it so horrifying," Dr. Samer Attar volunteering at Kamal Adwan hosptial told Democracy Now.

Meanwhile, an Israeli airstrike has just hit a residential building west of Al-Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.

Palestine's UN envoy says the famine-stricken north is now experiencing a "genocide within a genocide."

Israel has so far killed at least 42,519 people in Gaza, mostly women and children , although the toll did not incorporate the overnight killings.

The toll includes 99,637 people wounded since the Israeli war began in October 2023.

 

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