DEIR EL-BALAH – An Israeli strike killed at least 10 people, including a family of four, in Gaza City overnight, Palestinian medics said Monday, as Israel pursues its 14-month war against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip.
The strike late Sunday hit a house in Gaza City’s eastern Shijaiyah neighborhood, according to the Health Ministry’s emergency service. Rescuers recovered the bodies of 10 people from under the rubble, including those of two parents and their two children, it said.
The strikes were part of Israel’s war in Gaza that erupted on Oct. 7 2023, when Hamas militants from Gaza stormed into southern Israel, killing some 1, 200 people and taking another 250 hostage. Most of the hostages were released during a temporary ceasefire last year, but about 100 remain in Gaza, of whom about a third are believed to be dead.
Israel responded by heavy bombardment and a ground incursion into the Palestinian enclave, leaving nearly 45,000 Palestinians dead, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry’s tally does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but says more than of the dead were women and children.
A separate strike on a school on Sunday in the southern city of Khan Younis killed at least 13 people, including six children and two women, according to Nasser Hospital where the bodies were taken. The hospital initially reported the strike had killed 16 people, but it later revised the death toll as the three other bodies had been from a separate strike that hit a house.
The Israeli military said it had “conducted a precise strike on Hamas terrorists who were operating inside a command and control center embedded within a compound” that had served as a school in Khan Younis. It did not provide evidence.
In central Gaza’s Nuseirat urban refugee camp, mourners gathered for the funeral of a Palestinian journalist working for the Qatari-based Al Jazeera TV network who was killed Sunday in a strike on a point for Gaza’s civil defense agency. They carried his body through the street from the hospital, his blue bulletproof vest resting atop.
The strike also killed three civil defense workers, including the local head of the agency, according to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. The civil defense is Gaza’s main rescue agency and operates under the Hamas-run government.
Al Jazeera said Ahmad Baker Al-Louh, 39, had been covering rescue operations of a family wounded in an earlier bombing when he was killed.
The Israeli military said it had targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants “who were operating in a command and control center embedded in the offices of the ‘Civil Defense’ organization in Nuseirat.” It accused the journalist of having been a member of Islamic Jihad, an accusation his colleagues in Gaza denied.
Gaza’s civil defense also rejected the claims that militants had been operating from the site.
“We were stunned by the Israeli occupation statement,” Mahmoud al-Lawh, the journalist’s cousin, told The Associated Press. “These claims are lies and misleading to cover up this crime.”
___
Magdy reported from Cairo
___
Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
