An Israeli strike on a five-story building where displaced Palestinians were sheltering in the northern Gaza Strip killed at least 60 people early yesterday, more than half of them women and children, Gaza’s health ministry said.
In a separate development, Lebanon’s militant group Hezbollah said it has chosen Sheikh Naim Kassem as its new top leader following the killing of Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike last month.
The group said in a statement that Hezbollah’s decisionmaking Shura Council elected Kassem, who had been Nasrallah’s deputy leader for more than three decades, as the new secretary-general.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Hezbollah vowed to continue with Nasrallah’s policies “until victory is achieved.”
Marwan al-Hams, director of the field hospitals’ department at the Gaza health ministry, announced the toll from yesterday’s strike in the northern town of Beit Lahiya at a news conference. He said another 17 people were missing.
The ministry’s emergency service said the dead included at least 12 women and 20 children, including babies.
The dead included a mother and her five children, some of them adults, and a second mother with her six children, according to an initial casualty list provided by the emergency service.
Kamal Adwan Hospital director Hossam Abu Safiya said it was overwhelmed by the wave of wounded people from the strike.
Israeli forces raided the medical facility over the weekend, detaining dozens of medics.
The Israeli military has repeatedly struck shelters for displaced people in recent months, saying it carried out precise strikes targeting Palestinian militants and tried to avoid harming civilians. The strikes have often killed women and children.
The military said it detained scores of Hamas militants in the raid on Kamal Adwan, the latest in a series of raids on hospitals since the start of the war.
Israel has sharply restricted aid to the north this month, prompting a warning from the US that failure to facilitate greater aid efforts could lead to a reduction in military aid.
On Monday, Israel’s parliament passed two laws that could prevent the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) from operating in the Palestinian territories. It was the culmination of a long-running campaign against UNRWA, which Israel says has been infiltrated by Hamas, allegations denied by the agency.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7 last year killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting about 250. About 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, one-third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities. About 90 percent of the population of 2.3 million have been displaced from their homes, often multiple times.
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