Desk Report: Israeli air raids yesterday killed at least 50 people, including women and children, at the al-Fakhoora school, run by the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), in Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.
In another attack, the Israeli air strikes on residential blocks in south Gaza killed at least 32 Palestinians yesterday, medics said.
Such an offensive could compel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled south from the Israeli storming of Gaza City to move again, along with residents of Khan Younis, a city of more than 400,000, compounding a dire humanitarian crisis.
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has said in a statement that the al-Fakhoora school attack proves that Israel’s declared war on civilians aims to empty the entire northern Gaza Strip area of all Palestinian presence.
Earlier yesterday, the Israeli troops ordered the evacuation of Al-Shifa hospital “in the next hour” over loudspeakers, an AFP journalist at the scene reported.
Al-Shifa hospital — Gaza’s biggest — has become the focus of the Israel-Palestine war, now entering its seventh week.
The United Nations estimated 2,300 patients, staff and displaced Palestinians were sheltering at Al-Shifa before Israeli troops moved in on Wednesday.
Gaza health authorities raised their death toll to more than 12,000, including 5,000 children.
Hospital director Mohammed Abu Salmiya told AFP Israeli troops instructed him to ensure “the evacuation of patients, wounded, the displaced and medical staff, and that they should move on foot towards the seafront.”
Israel has bombed much of Gaza City – the enclave’s urban core – to rubble, ordered the depopulation of the northern half of the narrow strip and displaced around two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians. Many of those who have fled fear their homelessness could become permanent.
A senior aide to Israel’s prime minister urged Palestinian civilians on Friday to relocate away from Khan Younis as Israeli forces would have to advance into the city to oust Hamas fighters dug into underground tunnels and bunkers – suggesting an Israeli ground offensive into the south was imminent.
The pending Israeli advance into south Gaza may prove more complicated and deadlier than in the north, however, with the civilian population swelled by some 400,000 evacuees and fiercer fighting expected with militants dug into the Khan Younis region, a powerbase of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, according to a senior Israeli source and two ex-top officials.
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