An Israeli airstrike on a tent encampment housing displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza killed at least 11 people on Wednesday night.
At least 15 people were also wounded in the attack on Al Mawasi, which the Israeli forces had designated as a “humanitarian area” in western Khan Younis, medics said.
The news agency Shehab and the Palestinian Information Centre confirmed that at least 11 people were killed in the attack. The victims included women and children.
The Al Mawasi tent camp stretches 12 km along the coast, from the western part of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza to Khan Younis and Rafah in the south. Covering around 3 per cent of Gaza’s land, the area primarily consists of sandy hills. Before the Israeli war on Gaza began, it had a population of about 9,000 people, according to Al Jazeera.
Another Israeli attack on Shejaiya, a suburb of Gaza City, killed at least eight Palestinian, according to emergency services. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said a woman and a child were among those killed in the strike.
The Israeli military claimed that it had asked people in the area to evacuate before the strike.
The UN has maintained that there are no “safe enclaves” in Gaza anymore and that frequent Israeli evacuation orders worsen the humanitarian situation.
More than 1,500 tents housing displaced Palestinians in Gaza were flooded after heavy rain, worsening their plight. At least six infants and one other person froze to death over the past week as temperatures dropped below 10 degrees Celsius at night, the health ministry said.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed over 45,500 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, and displaced nearly 90 per cent of the besieged territory’s 2.3 million people. Humanitarian agencies estimate that 1.6 million Gazans are living in makeshift shelters, nearly half a million in flood-prone areas.
Most children eat only one meal a day, further reducing their ability to withstand the cold.
The population of Gaza has declined by 6 per cent since Israel launched the war on the territory 15 months ago, with 100,000 people fleeing and over 55,000 presumed dead, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said.
The population now stands at 2.1 million, nearly half of it under 18, the bureau added. It accused Israel of conducting “a brutal aggression against Gaza targeting all kinds of life there, humans, buildings and vital infrastructure. Entire families were erased from the civil register. There are catastrophic human and material losses.”
Israel’s foreign ministry dismissed the numbers as “fabricated and manipulated”.
Additional reporting by agencies.
