Strike and inferno in Gaza hospital courtyard
Even as attention has shifted to Lebanon, Israel is still striking the Gaza Strip more than a year after Hamas' Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel triggered the war there and set off escalations across the region.
Early on Monday, an Israeli airstrike on a hospital courtyard in the Gaza Strip killed at least four people and triggered a fire that swept through a tent camp for people displaced by the war, leaving more than two dozen with severe burns.
The Israeli military said the strike in Gaza targeted militants hiding out among civilians, without providing evidence. In recent months it has repeatedly struck crowded shelters and tent camps, alleging that Hamas fighters were using them as staging grounds for attacks.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah was already struggling to treat a large number of wounded from an earlier strike on a school-turned-shelter that killed at least 20 people when the early morning airstrike hit and fire engulfed many of the tents.
Several secondary explosions could be heard after the initial strike, but it was not immediately clear if they were caused by weapons or fuel tanks.
Associated Press footage showed children among the wounded. A man sobbed as he carried a toddler with a bandaged head in his arms. Another small child with a bandaged leg was given a blood transfusion on the floor of the packed hospital.
Hospital records showed that four people were killed and 40 wounded. Twenty-five people were transferred to Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza after suffering severe burns, according to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Around 90% of Gaza's population of 2.3 million people have been displaced by the war, often multiple times, and large areas of the coastal territory have been completely destroyed.
- Israeli rights groups warn of forced transfer in northern Gaza -
Israel has ordered the entire remaining population of the northern third of Gaza, estimated at around 400,000 people, to evacuate to the south and has not allowed any food to enter the north since the start of the month. Hundreds of thousands of people from the north heeded Israeli evacuation orders at the start of the war and have not been allowed to return.
That has raised fears among Palestinians that Israel intends to implement a plan devised by former generals in which it would order all civilians out of northern Gaza and label anyone remaining there a combatant — a surrender-or-starve strategy that rights groups say would violate international law.
The plan has been presented to the Israeli government, but it's unclear whether it has been adopted. The military says it has not received such orders.
Israeli rights groups on Monday called on the international community to prevent Israel from carrying out the plan, saying there are “alarming signs” that Israel is beginning to implement it.
The statement, signed by B'Tselem, Gisha, Yesh Din and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, warned that states “have an obligation to prevent the crimes of starvation and forcible transfer.