Hospitals in Gaza said the Israeli attack killed at least 29 Palestinians on Saturday, one of the highest casualties since an October ceasefire aimed at ending the fighting.
Smoke rises after a projectile hit a building during an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on Saturday. (Reuters)A day after Israel accused Hamas of violating a new cease-fire, strikes hit locations across Gaza, including an apartment building in Gaza City and a tent camp in Khan Younis, hospital officials who received the bodies said. The casualties include two women and six children from two different families. An airstrike on a police station in Gaza City killed at least 14 people and injured others, said Mohammed Abu Selmia, director of Shifa Hospital.
The series of strikes came a day before the opening of the Rafah crossing along the border with Egypt in the southern city of Gaza. All border crossings in the region have been closed for almost the entire war. Palestinians see Rafah as a lifeline for thousands of people in need of treatment outside the territory, where most of the medical infrastructure has been destroyed.
The opening of the crossing, limited at first, marks the first major step in the second phase of the US-brokered ceasefire. Reopening the border is now among the challenging issues on the ongoing agenda, including installing a new government to oversee the demilitarization and reconstruction of the Strip after nearly two decades of Hamas rule.
Still, Saturday’s strikes are a reminder that the death toll in Gaza is still rising even as a ceasefire agreement inches forward.
Nasser Hospital said a strike at the tent camp led to the fire, which killed seven people, including a father, his three children and three grandchildren. Meanwhile, Shifa Hospital said an apartment building strike in Gaza City killed three children, their aunt and grandmother on Saturday morning, while a strike at a police station killed at least 14 people — including four policewomen and officers and prisoners at the station. The Hamas-run Interior Ministry said Palestinian civilians were also killed in the attack.
Hamas called Saturday’s attack “a new flagrant violation” and called on the United States and other mediating countries to pressure Israel to end the attacks.
Israel’s military, which has struck targets on both sides of the ceasefire line, has said its strikes since October are in response to violations of the agreement. It said in a statement that Saturday’s strikes followed what it described as a ceasefire violation a day earlier, when the army killed at least four militants emerging from a tunnel in the Israeli-held Rafah region.
Gaza’s health ministry says 509 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the ceasefire began on October 10.
