LAST UPDATE | 10 Sep
AN ISRAELI STRIKE on a so-called humanitarian zone in the south of the Gaza Strip has killed 19 people, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
The strike hit Al-Mawasi – in Gaza’s main southern city of Khan Younis – which was designated a safe zone by the Israeli military early in the war, with tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians seeking refuge there.
The Israeli army said it had targeted “significant Hamas terrorists who were operating within a command-and-control centre embedded inside the humanitarian area”, which Hamas has denied.
The Gaza health ministry said 19 bodies had been brought to hospitals since the early morning strike, but more victims were likely still buried in the sand.
Gaza’s Civil Defence had earlier reported that 40 people had been killed and 60 others had been wounded in the strike. The Israeli military said the figure did “not align with the information” it had.
Tánaiste Micheál Martin today condemned the strike on the safe zone, claiming that it was a further sign that the conflict in Gaza is “going on far too long”. He reiterated his call for a immediate ceasefire.
“It’s a war on the Palestinian people now and people are suffering too much. We need to ceasefire,” Martin said.
However, Israel’s military has occasionally carried out operations in and around the area, including a strike in July that it said killed Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, and which Gaza health authorities said killed more than 90 people.
Survivors of the strike scrambled to retrieve their belongings from the rubble, including mattresses and clothing, an AFP journalist reported.
Samar al-Shair, one of tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians who have sought refuge in the coastal area, said the attack came “as we were sleeping in our tents”, setting makeshift shelters ablaze.
She told AFP the Israeli military had asked Palestinians to go to Al-Mawasi, “telling us it was safe. Where is the safety?”
The Israeli military said some of the dead were “directly involved in the execution” of Hamas’s 7 October attack.
“The terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip continue to systematically abuse civilian and humanitarian infrastructure, including the designated Humanitarian Area, to carry out terrorist activity against the State of Israel and IDF troops,” it said.
Hamas said claims its fighters were present at the scene of the strike were “a blatant lie”.
Over the course of the war, Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of using civilians as human shields, an accusation the group denies.
Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said people sheltering in the camp in the dunes along the Mediterranean coast had not been warned of the strike, which left behind “three deep craters”.
“There are entire families who disappeared under the sand,” he said.
UN envoy Tor Wennesland condemned the strike, saying international humanitarian law “must be upheld at all times”, while stressing “civilians must never be used as human shields”.
Turkey said the strike added to Israel’s “list of war crimes”, while Egypt denounced “the continuation of Israeli massacres” and Saudi Arabia decried “a new attack in a repeated series of violations by the Israeli war machine”.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy condemned “the shocking deaths”, which he said showed “how desperately needed” a Gaza ceasefire was.
The current conflict has been ongoing since Hamas’s 7 October attack, which resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures, which includes hostages killed in captivity.
Militants seized 251 captives during the attack, 97 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip has so far killed at least 41,020 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
The UN human rights office says most of the dead are women and children.
The vast majority of Gaza’s 2.4 million people have been displaced at least once during nearly a year of war, according to the United Nations.
From 1,200 inhabitants per square kilometre before the war, the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone now houses “between 30,000 and 34,000 people per square kilometre”, and its protected area shrank from 50 square kilometres to 41, the UN has calculated.
The United States, Qatar and Egypt have been mediating in efforts to forge a ceasefire and hostage-prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas, but talks remain stalled.
Hamas is demanding a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as part of any deal, but Israel insists troops must remain along the Gaza-Egypt border.
In Cairo, the European Union’s foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell said the bloc fully supported a truce.
But “those who are waging war have no interest in putting an end to it”, Borrell told reporters.
Includes reporting by Muiris O’Cearbhaill
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