Gaza’s Civil Defence reported late Monday night that an Israeli airstrike on the declared humanitarian zone of Al-Mawasi in Khan Yunis (south) killed at least 40 people, while the Israeli military claimed to have targeted a Hamas “command centre.”
“Forty martyrs and 60 injured were retrieved and transferred to nearby hospitals following the strike,” said Mohammed al-Mughair, a Civil Defence official, to AFP.
“Our teams are still searching for fifteen missing people after the strike targeted tents of displaced individuals in Al-Mawasi,” he added.
Sources close to Civil Defence in the Gaza Strip earlier stated that at least 20 tents caught fire, and Israeli missiles created craters up to nine meters deep.
“Entire families were annihilated in the Al-Mawasi massacre,” said another Civil Defence official, Mahmoud Basal.
The Israeli military asserted that it “struck significant Hamas terrorists operating in a command and control centre embedded within the humanitarian area in Khan Yunis,” adding that “the terrorists (…) carried out terrorist attacks against soldiers (…) and the State of Israel.”
“Terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip continue to systematically exploit political and humanitarian infrastructure, including the declared humanitarian zone, to engage in terrorist activities,” they maintained.
Hamas refuted the presence of its military wing members in the bombed humanitarian zone, calling the Israeli allegations “a brazen lie.”
Almost the entire population of approximately 2.4 million in the Gaza Strip has been forcibly displaced multiple times, with some families fleeing ten or more times since the war began last October.
The armed conflict, now in its 340th day, was triggered by an unprecedented raid by Hamas’s military wing from the Gaza Strip into the southern part of Israeli territory, resulting in the deaths of 1,205 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to a count based on the most recent official Israeli data.
Of the 251 people abducted that day, 97 remain hostages of Palestinian movement fighters, but 33 have been declared dead by the Israeli military.
The large-scale Israeli military retaliatory operations in the small coastal Palestinian enclave have claimed the lives of at least 41,000 people and have caused a major humanitarian and health crisis. According to the UN, most of the victims were women and children.
