NINE of one doctor’s 10 children were among the dead in the latest Israeli strikes on Gaza.
The bodies of 79 people killed over a 24-hour period were taken to hospitals, Gaza’s health minister said yesterday – adding that this toll does not include hospitals in the battered north which are now inaccessible.
Alaa Najjar, a paediatrician at Nasser Hospital, was on duty at the time and ran home to find her family’s house on fire, Ahmad al-Farra, head of the hospital’s paediatric department, told the Associated Press.
Najjar’s husband was severely wounded and their only surviving child, an 11-year-old boy, was in a critical condition after Friday’s strike in the southern city of Khan Younis, Farra said.
The dead children ranged in age from seven months to 12 years old. Khalil Al-Dokran, a spokesman for Gaza’s health ministry, said that two of the children remained under the rubble.
Israel’s military in a statement said it struck suspects operating from a structure next to its forces, and described the area of Khan Younis as a “dangerous war zone”.
It said it had evacuated civilians from the area and “the claim regarding harm to uninvolved civilians is under review”.
Earlier on Saturday, a statement said Israel’s air force struck more than 100 targets throughout Gaza over the past day.
The health ministry said the new deaths took the war’s toll to 53,901 since October 7 2023, when Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel, killing around 1200 people and taking another 250 hostage. Most of the Palestinians who have been killed were women and children.
The ministry said 3747 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel broke the ceasefire deal on March 18 in an effort to pressure Hamas to accept different terms.
Israel’s pressure on Hamas has included a blockade of Gaza and its more than two million people since early March.
This week, a small number of aid trucks entered the territory and began reaching Palestinians for the first time since the blockade began.
But they were far fewer than the about 600 trucks a day that had been entering during the ceasefire.
Warnings of famine by food security experts, and images of desperate Palestinians jostling for bowls of food at the ever-shrinking number of charity kitchens, led Israel’s allies to press Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to allow some aid to return.
Netanyahu’s government has sought a new aid delivery and distribution system by a newly established US-backed group, but the United Nations and partners have rejected it, saying it allows Israel to use food as a weapon and violates humanitarian principles.
Israel may now be changing its approach to let aid groups remain in charge of non-food assistance, according to a letter obtained by the AP.
