Israeli forces on Friday shelled tent camps for displaced Palestinians outside Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, killing at least 25 people and wounding another 50, to the territory’s health officials and emergency workers said.
Witnesses whose relatives died in one of the bombardments near a Red Cross field hospital north of Rafah said that Israeli forces fired a second volley that killed people who came out of their tents.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said the hospital was flooded with casualties, including 22 dead and 45 wounded, and condemned the firing of “high-caliber projectiles” a few meters from the facility.
Photo: Reuters
Hundreds of people live in tents nearby, including many of the hospital staff, the ICRC said.
Ahmed Radwan, a spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defense first responders in Rafah, said witnesses told rescue workers about shelling at two locations in a coastal area that has become filled with makeshift tents.
The locations of the attacks provided by the Civil Defense and the Red Cross hospital appeared to be just outside an Israeli-designated safe zone on the Mediterranean coast, known as Muwasi.
The Israeli military said the episode was under review, but “there is no indication that a strike was carried out by the IDF[Israel Defense Forces]” inside the safe zone.
It did not offer details on the episode or say what the intended targets might have been.
With Israel’s war against Hamas now in its ninth month, international criticism is growing over the campaign of systematic destruction in Gaza, at a huge cost in civilian lives.
The hospital’s location is known to all parties in the conflict and marked with the Red Cross emblem, the ICRC said on Friday.
The 60-bed field hospital was opened in the middle of last month to provide emergency surgeries, obstetric, pediatric and outpatient care, a news release said at the time.
Elsewhere, Civil Defense teams in the northern Gaza Strip recovered the bodies of five people who were killed in an airstrike that hit two apartments in Gaza City, and several others were wounded. An airstrike earlier on Friday hit a municipal garage in the city and killed five people.
Fadel Naeem, the orthopedic chief at al-Ahli hospital, said that the bodies of 30 people were brought there on Friday, calling it “a difficult and brutal day in Gaza City.”
Meanwhile, the Israeli army said that two soldiers were killed in combat in central Gaza. No information was given about the circumstances of the deaths of the two, both men in their 20s. Three other Israeli soldiers were severely injured, the army said.
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