GAZA: Zionist strikes blasted a huge crater in a designated safe zone in southern Gaza before dawn on Tuesday, setting tents ablaze and burying Palestinian families under sand. The Zionist military used several US-made MK-84 bombs, each weighing 2,000 pounds, in their attack on Al-Mawasi, two independent probes confirmed. Palestinian officials said scores of people had been killed or injured in the strikes, with at least 19 dead bodies brought to hospital and other victims feared lost or buried.

The Gaza government media office put the number of fatalities at more than 40. It said that at least 60 others were wounded in the strikes and many remained missing. The Gaza civil emergency service said at least 20 tents caught fire. It estimated 65 dead or wounded including women and children.

The strike hit Al-Mawasi — in Gaza’s southern province of Khan Yunis — which was designated a safe zone by the Zionist military early in the war, with tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians seeking refuge there. The Zionist offensive in Gaza has killed at least 41,020 people, mostly women and children.

Kuwait strongly condemned the new massacre committed by Zionist occupation forces against innocent displaced Palestinians in Khan Yunis. In a statement on Tuesday, Kuwait’s ministry of foreign affairs said this brutal targeting of defenseless civilians, including women and children, is clear evidence that the Zionist occupation forces are waging an extermination war against the Palestinians in flagrant violation of international and humanitarian laws. Rescuers dug with shovels through the night, searching for bodies and survivors buried where the strike had blasted a crater the size of a small football pitch. Tents in the surrounding area had been incinerated, leaving only metal frames dusted with ghostly ash in a wasteland littered with debris. A car had been completely buried, only its top visible beneath the sand.

In the morning, mourners at a nearby hospital wailed over bodies heaped in white plastic bags or wrapped in bloodstained shrouds. One of Raed Abu Muammar’s daughters had been killed. His wife and his other daughter had been buried but were pulled out alive. He carried the surviving baby girl.

“I was under the sand as well. I got out and started looking for my daughters and my wife. I saw body parts of the neighbors in my tent - I did not know those were our neighbors’ parts

until I saw my family in one piece. These are the (Zionist) targets. Look at them,” he said, gesturing to the baby girl in his arms. “We were in humanitarian areas that were supposed to be safe.”

Residents and medics said the camp was struck by five or six missiles or bombs. “We saw women cut in pieces, children cut in pieces and martyrs. There are still people missing. People are looking for them and they still have not found them yet,” survivor Ola Al-Shaer told Reuters at the site. “Our teams are still moving out martyrs and wounded from the targeted area. It looks like a new (Zionist) massacre,” a Gaza civil emergency official said.

Civil defense spokesman Mahmud Basal said people sheltering in the camp in the dunes along the Mediterranean coast had not been warned of the strike. The strike left behind “three deep craters”, he said, adding: “There are entire families who disappeared under the sand.”

Survivors of the strike scrambled to retrieve their belongings from the rubble, including mattresses and clothing, an AFP journalist reported. “They told us to come to Al-Mawasi, so we came to Al-Mawasi, we settled here. The area was bombed without prior warning, they didn’t ask us to flee to a safer area or anything,” a Palestinian man told AFP without giving his name.

Hamas said claims its fighters were present at the scene of the strike were “a blatant lie”. UN envoy Tor Wennesland condemned the strike, saying international humanitarian law “must be upheld at all times”, while stressing “civilians must never be used as human shields”.

Meanwhile, the Zionist military said on Tuesday it was highly likely its forces accidentally shot dead a US-Turkish activist during a protest in the occupied West Bank last week. Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was killed on Friday in the West Bank town of Beita, the site of weekly demonstrations against Zionist settlements.

In a statement on Eygi’s death, the Zionist military said an inquiry had “found that it is highly likely that she was hit indirectly and unintentionally by (Zionist) fire”. It added that the fire “was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of the riot”. The United Nations rights office had earlier said Zionist forces killed Eygi with a “shot in the head”.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday said he will press the Zionist entity to make “fundamental changes” in its operations in the occupied West Bank. After an initially measured response to Friday’s death of Eygi pending a fact-finding exercise, Blinken said the United States would raise her death at senior levels with its key ally. The investigation, and eyewitness accounts, make clear “that her killing was both unprovoked and unjustified”, Blinken told reporters on a visit to London.

“No one should be shot and killed for attending a protest. No one should have to put their life at risk just for freely expressing their views,” he said. “We have the second American citizen killed at the hands of (Zionist) security forces. It’s not acceptable. It has to change.” Blinken renewed concern about the lack of repercussions for Zionist settlers who have attacked Palestinians in the West Bank as war rages in Gaza.

Eygi’s family rejected the military’s version of events and called its preliminary inquiry “wholly inadequate”. “She was taking shelter in an olive grove when she was shot in the head and killed by a bullet from a (Zionist) soldier,” they said in a statement. “This cannot be misconstrued as anything other except a deliberate, targeted and precise attack by the military against an unarmed civilian.”

The US has maintained its support for the Zionist entity despite repeated concern over the deaths of US citizens. The State Department said last month that it would not impose sanctions on a Zionist unit involved in the death of a Palestinian-American grocer, Omar Assad, who died after being handcuffed, gagged and blindfolded in the cold. In 2022, the US said it did not have evidence that the Zionist entity deliberately killed Shireen Abu Akleh, a prominent Al Jazeera journalist who held US citizenship. – Agencies