• Families displaced by conflict took refuge in the facility
• Palestinians mourn, bury victims

CAIRO: An Israeli strike on a post office sheltering Gaza residents killed at least 30 Palestinians and wounded 50, medics said on Friday.

Families displaced by the 14-month-old conflict had sought refuge in the postal facility in the Nuseirat camp, and the strike late on Thursday brought the day’s death toll in the enclave to 66, the medics said.

Israel said its target was an Islamic Jihad leader of attacks on Israeli civilians and troops. An Israeli military statement said it was reviewing reports on the number of casualties. It did not identify the Islamic Jihad member by name.

Nuseirat is one of the Gaza Strips eight historic camps originally for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war around the establishment of Israel. Today, it is part of a dense urban area crowded with displaced people from throughout the enclave.

Earlier on Thursday, two Israeli strikes in southern Gaza killed 13 Palestinians who Gaza medics and Hamas said were part of a force protecting humanitarian aid trucks. Israel’s military said they were Hamas fighters.

Many of those killed in the attacks on Rafah and Khan Younis had links to Hamas, according to sources close to the group.

The Israeli military said in a statement the two airstrikes aimed to ensure the safe delivery of humanitarian aid and accused Hamas members of planning to prevent the aid from reaching Gaza civilians.

Armed gangs have repeatedly hijacked aid trucks, and Hamas has formed a task force to confront them. The Hamas-led forces have killed over two dozen members of the gangs in recent months, Hamas sources and medics said.

Hamas said Israeli military strikes have killed at least 700 policemen tasked with securing aid trucks in Gaza since the conflict began on Oct 7, 2023.

Separately, the Israeli military on Thursday ordered residents of several districts in the heart of Gaza City to evacuate, saying it would respond to rockets fired from those areas. At nightfall on Thursday, dozens of families streamed out of the areas heading toward the centre of the city.

Mourning

Dozens of relatives wept and recited verses from the Holy Quran at a Gaza Strip hospital on Friday before burying some of the Palestinians killed in the Israeli airstrike on a post office where they had been sheltering.

Some of the bodies gathered al Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat were wrapped in white shrouds and others in blankets from home. The families accompanied them on a walk to their graves.

“They have killed the hope and optimism,” said Suheil Ma­­ttar, whose grandchildren and daughter-in-law were killed.

“Every time things happen and we say there will be a truce and we will rest… After that, they change their minds, they change their minds, we don’t know why,” Mattar said.

“We’ve seen absolutely horrific images from the scene,” Louise Wateridge, a senior emergency officer for the UN Palestinian relief agency, told a UN press briefing in Geneva by video link from Nuseirat on Friday.

“There are parents looking for their children, children covered in dust and blood, looking for their parents, multiple injuries on top of the casualties reported and people still buried under the rubble,” she said. Months of ceasefire efforts by Arab mediators, Egypt and Qatar, backed by the United States, have failed to conclude a deal between the two warring sides.

US National Security Advi­ser Jake Sullivan said in Tel Aviv on Thursday he believed a deal on a Gaza ceasefire and prisoner release may be close as Israel had signalled it was ready and there were signs of movement from Hamas.

Since the conflict began in October last year, the Israeli military has levelled swathes of Gaza, driving nearly all of its 2.3 million people from their homes, giving rise to deadly hunger and disease and killing more than 44,800 people, according to Palestinian health authorities.

Published in Dawn, December 14th, 2024