The civil defense of the Gaza Strip announced on the night of Monday to Tuesday that at least 40 people were killed in shelling by the Israeli army in the declared humanitarian zone Al Mawasi, in Khan Younis (south), while the Israeli armed forces reported from the for their part that they hit a Hamas “command center”.
“40 martyrs and 60 injured”
“40 witnesses and 60 wounded were pulled out and treated” in nearby hospitals after the shelling, Mohammed al-Mughair, a civil protection official in the Palestinian enclave, summarized, speaking to AFP.
“They targeted displaced people’s tents”
“Our teams are continuing efforts to locate fifteen people who are missing following the strike that targeted displaced persons’ tents in Al Mawasi,” he added.
Fire in 20 displaced persons’ tents
Sources close to civil protection in the Gaza Strip announced earlier that at least 20 tents caught fire, while Israeli rockets caused craters up to nine meters deep.
“Entire families were wiped out in the massacre in al-Mawashi,” said another civil protection official, Mahmoud Basal.
“We hit Hamas terrorists”
The Israeli military said for its part that it “struck significant Hamas terrorists operating in a command and control center embedded in the humanitarian area in Khan Yunis,” adding that “the terrorists (…) were carrying out terrorist attacks against soldiers (…) and the of the State of Israel”.
“Terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip continue to systematically abuse political and humanitarian infrastructure, including the declared humanitarian zone, to engage in terrorist activities,” he insisted.
“shameless lie”
Hamas denied that members of its military arm were in the bombed humanitarian zone.
“The (Israeli) occupation’s accusations of the presence of resistance fighters are a shameless lie,” Hamas, in power in the enclave since 2007, said via Telegram.
Almost the entire population of approximately 2.4 million people in the Gaza Strip has been repeatedly forcibly displaced, some families having fled ten or more times, since war broke out in the enclave last October.
On the 340th day of armed conflict
The armed conflict, now in its 340th day, was sparked by an unprecedented incursion by Hamas’ military arm from the Gaza Strip into southern Israeli territory, which killed 1,205 people, mostly Israelis. civilians, according to a count based on the most recent official Israeli data. Of the 251 people abducted that day, 97 remain hostages of the Palestinian movement militants, however 33 of them have been declared dead by the Israeli army.
Large-scale Israeli military retaliatory operations in the small coastal Palestinian enclave have so far claimed the lives of at least 41,000 people and caused a major humanitarian and health crisis. According to the UN, most of the victims were women and children.
Source: RES-MPE
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