More than fifty people have been killed by an explosion in the Jabalia refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip. This is what the director of the hospital in the refugee camp told Al Jazeera. According to the director, this is not yet the total number of victims, and counting is still underway.
“It is a huge massacre. It is difficult to count how many buildings have been destroyed here,” said Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Sharif at the scene. Residents of the camp try to rescue others from under the rubble. Others stand next to it, crying.
“Hundreds of civilians lived in these buildings,” a ministry spokesman told reporters in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, calling it “the latest massacre caused by Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip.”
Jabalia resident Ragheb Aqal describes this afternoon’s bombing of the refugee camp as “an earthquake” that shook the entire camp. “I went there and saw the devastation. Houses buried under rubble and body parts, martyrs and wounded in large numbers,” Aqal told AFP reporters.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of the Interior, it was a bombing by the Israeli air force, and 400 people were killed and injured. “It is not an exaggeration when they talk about hundreds of martyrs and wounded,” Aqal said. He says that people are still busy carrying away the bodies of victims, including children, women and the elderly.
Video footage from the AFP news agency shows 47 bodies of people who did not survive the bombing. The local hospital previously said more than 50 deaths had been reported. The Israeli army has not yet responded.
Maarten Albers
