64 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza Strip: Civil defence

Gaza: At least 64 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, the Civil Defence in Gaza said.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Civil Defence, told Xinhua news agency on Saturtday that seven young men were killed and several others wounded when Israeli artillery shelled a group of Palestinians trying to reach their homes in the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood, east of Gaza City.

Basal added that four people, including a woman and two children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted the gate of Salah al-Din School, which houses displaced families in the west of Gaza City, while a fifth person was killed in an airstrike on a residential apartment north of the city, Xinhua news agency reported.

At least 11 others were killed in attacks on a Palestinian gathering, while nine others were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a warehouse for distributing humanitarian aid in the city of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, according to Basal.

The Hamas-run Gaza government condemned the attack on the warehouse, considering it “a serious and ongoing escalation of the systematic starvation policy pursued by the occupation in the Gaza Strip”.

At least 13 others were killed in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, while 19 others were killed in Jabalia, Beit Lahia, and Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, Basal said.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement in the early morning of Saturday that over the past day, “the IDF has begun conducting extensive strikes and mobilising troops to achieve operational control in areas of the Gaza Strip.”

Since Israel resumed its intensified military campaign on March 18, at least 3,131 Palestinians have been killed and 8,632 others injured, bringing the overall death toll in Gaza since the war began in October 2023 to 53,272, with a total of 120,673 people injured, according to health authorities in Gaza on Saturday.

Gaza’s Government Media Office has said that more than 200 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks over the past 48 hours, with 1,000 housing units destroyed.

Another 140 victims remain buried in the debris of destroyed buildings with the Israeli military’s “deliberate prevention of ambulance and civil defence crews from reaching the bombed areas in northern Gaza”.

–IANS