By Ephrat Livni, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Abu Bakr Bashir
Israeli airstrikes slammed into a humanitarian area in the southern Gaza Strip early Tuesday, leaving large craters where Palestinians had crowded for shelter and, according to Gaza officials, killing or wounding dozens of people.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the strikes had targeted three senior Hamas militants who had been involved in the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assault on Israel.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 19 people were confirmed dead and more than 60 others injured — figures that appeared likely to rise because it said that there were still victims in the area, including some buried in rubble and sand, and that ambulances had not been able to reach them. Health officials in Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and combatants when reporting casualties.
An official with Civil Defense emergency services in Gaza, Muhammad al-Mughaier, had said that 40 bodies were recovered from the site of the strike. The reason for the discrepancy was not immediately clear, although official accounts of death tolls often fluctuate in the early hours after an attack.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the figures from Civil Defense “do not align with the information” it has, but did not offer its own casualty estimate or comment on the numbers from the Health Ministry. It said it had carried out a “precise strike” and had tried to mitigate the risk to civilians, though it declined to answer questions from The New York Times about the specific steps it had taken.
Videos of the aftermath of the attack verified by the Times show craters in the southwestern part of Muwasi, where satellite imagery from a week earlier showed several tents. Images taken at the scene Tuesday morning show people searching in rubble using the lights on their phones, and emergency workers from the Palestine Red Crescent Society digging with shovels.
Palestinians sheltering in Muwasi said the strike came without warning around midnight or 1 a.m., with large explosions jolting their tents and filling them with smoke.
“It was like an earthquake,” said Marwan Shaath, a 57-year-old civil servant from the southern Gaza city of Rafah who has been sheltering with his family in Muwasi for more than three months. “The entire area, and of course the tent, all kept shaking.”
Fatoom al-Garra, a 30-year-old widow from Rafah, said she and her children ran for safety from sounds of “horror” and a burning smell. “We couldn’t see anything as black smoke and dust were covering the area,” she said.
Muwasi, a once sparsely populated part of southern Gaza, is now packed with tens of thousands of Palestinians who took shelter there. The Israeli military has designated the area as a humanitarian zone, but it has maintained that it will go after militants wherever it believes them to be. Israeli airstrikes also hit the area in July, in operations the military said were aimed at Hamas commanders. At the time, Gaza health officials said that strike had killed scores of people.
In its statement on Tuesday, the Israeli military said that it had conducted aerial surveillance in the hours before the strike that it said confirmed the presence of militants in the area where it struck.
Israel has long said that Hamas embeds itself among civilians to use them as human shields. International law experts have said Israel still has a responsibility to protect civilians during its military operations. More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza in 11 months of war, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Tor Wennesland, condemned the strike. “The killing of civilians must stop, and this horrific war must end,” he said.
The United Nations and other rights organizations have said that there is no safe place in Gaza. Almost the entire population of Gaza — more than 2 million Palestinians — has been displaced multiple times. Israel has ordered frequent evacuations and has shrunk the size of the humanitarian zone, forcing an increasing number of Palestinians to squeeze into ever tighter areas.
Al-Garra said that Israel’s urgings to seek shelter in Muwasi were hollow.
“What safety are they talking about?” she said. “There is no safety.”
Kommentare