GAZA, Palestine
An Israeli airstrike on a makeshift tent camp for displaced Palestinians killed at least 35 people in Rafah on Sunday night, the Gaza Health Ministry said. The Israeli military said its operation was aimed at a Hamas compound.
Israeli aircraft had used
“precise munitions” in the strike, the military said in a statement, adding
that it was looking into reports that “several civilians in the area were
harmed” by the strike and subsequent fire. A follow-up statement said two Hamas
leaders had been killed in the strike.
The Palestine Red Crescent
Society said its ambulance crews had taken a “large” number of victims to the
Tal as Sultan clinic and field hospitals in Rafah, where few functioning
hospitals remain, and that “numerous” people were trapped in fires at the site
of the strikes.
The strike hit the Tal as
Sultan area of Rafah, within what the Israeli military has designated as a
“humanitarian zone,” where it had told Palestinian civilians to go for shelter
ahead of its offensive in Rafah, the Red Crescent said.
The New York Times could not
immediately confirm details of the airstrike. The attack came hours after Hamas
fired a barrage of rockets at central Israel, setting off air-raid sirens
in Tel Aviv for the first time in months.
ALSO READ: Hamas launches rocket attack towards Tel Aviv area
Doctors Without Borders said
more than 15 dead people and dozens of wounded in the Rafah strike were brought
to a trauma stabilization center that it supports in Tal as Sultan.
Dr. James Smith, a British
emergency specialist in Rafah who has been working at that center, said the
attack had killed displaced people who were “seeking some degree of sanctuary
and shelter in tarpaulin tents.”
Speaking from a house a few
miles away from the trauma center, a distance that he said had become too
dangerous to cross, Dr. Smith said footage shared by his colleagues at the
trauma center of injuries from the strike and the fire were “truly some of the
worst that I have seen.”
Though the United Nations
estimates that more than 800,000 people had fled Rafah in a matter of weeks
after the Israeli military announced its offensive, the area remains densely
populated, Dr. Smith said.
“These are very, very tightly
packed tents,” he said. “And a fire like this could spread over a huge distance
with catastrophic consequences in a very, very short space of time.”
The attack was “one of the
most horrific things that I have seen or heard of in all of the weeks that I’ve
been working in Gaza,” he added.
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