He The Israeli army attacked a tent camp designated as a “humanitarian zone” near Khan Yunis early Tuesday morning, in southern Gaza, leaving at least 40 dead and more than 60 wounded, according to reports from officials in the Hamas-controlled Strip.
According to the criteria of
“Entire families disappeared in the sand in the Mawasi massacre in Khan Yunis,” wrote the spokesman for Civil Defense in the enclave, Mahmud Basal, who said that Between 20 and 40 of the 200 shops that the refugee camp housed were destroyed.
Entire families disappeared in the sand during the Mawasi massacre in Khan Yunis
The spokesman said that the people sheltering in that camp had not been warned of the attack. and explained that the shortage of tools and equipment was hampering rescue operations.
“The explosion created a large crater. Bodies and tents were mixed in the sand and several people are missing,” said the Civil Defense services of the enclave, who describe what happened as a “horrible massacre” and continue to search for bodies.
Israel, for its part, justified the attack with fighter planes by claiming the presence of Hamas members in the area. and said it had killed three senior Hamas officials in the bombing.
“The militants included Samer Ismail Khadr Abu Daqqa, head of Hamas’s air unit. Additionally, terrorist Osama Tabesh, head of the Observation and Targeting Department of Hamas’s Military Intelligence headquarters; and Ayman Mabhouh, another high-ranking terrorist” of the Islamist organization, reported the military statement, which did not provide evidence in this regard.
The armed forces claimed that all of them participated in the attacks of October 7. in which Palestinian militants from Gaza, under the leadership of Hamas, killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped another 251 – of whom 97 remain in the enclave, at least thirty already dead.
“Terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip continue to systematically abuse civilian and humanitarian infrastructure, including the designated humanitarian zone, to carry out terrorist activity against the State of Israel,” he said.
The Islamist organisation has not yet claimed any deaths in its ranks, something it usually does hours later. But shortly after the bombing, at around three in the morning, Hamas said the allegations that “resistance members were present at the site of the attack” were a blatant lie.
This is not the first time that Israel has attacked the “humanitarian zone” located off the coast in southern Gaza. Last July, it carried out one of its most violent bombings against this space, killing 90 people along the beaches of Mawasi with the aim of eliminating Mohammed Deif, head of the armed wing of Hamas.
The death toll is the second highest in an Israeli attack on the humanitarian zone in Gaza, although the army denied that the figure of 40 dead was true, saying it was “lies and false information” from Hamas.
Israel also claims to have used “precision munitions” during the bombing and to have taken prior measures “to mitigate the risk of harming civilians.”
The armed forces designated a “humanitarian zone” covering the territories of Mawasi and Khan Yunis in southern Gaza and Deir al Balah in central Gaza.although they have been reducing their perimeter over the months under the premise that the militants use it to attack the troops.
Ninety percent of Gaza’s population – more than two million people – have been displaced by the war, and the vast majority are crammed into the swarm of tents in the “humanitarian zone”, with poor humanitarian conditions marked by shortages of water or electricity.
In the Al Mawasi area, where the population density was 1,200 inhabitants per square kilometre before the war, the density has now reached “between 30,000 and 40,000 people per square kilometre” while the supposedly safe area has been reduced from 50 to 41 km2, according to the UN.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “more than a million people did not receive any food rations in August in southern and central Gaza” due to the reduced flow of humanitarian aid trucks entering the enclave.
#Israel #attacks #humanitarian #zone #Gaza #leaving #dead #injured #Entire #families #disappeared