GAZA: Gaza’s civil defense agency said Saturday that a Zionist strike in the southern city of Khan Yunis killed nine children from the same family. Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said civil defense crews retrieved “the bodies of nine child martyrs, some of them charred, from the home of Dr Hamdi Al-Najjar and his wife, Dr Alaa Al-Najjar, all of whom were their children”.

He added that Hamdi Al-Najjar and another son, Adam, were also seriously wounded in the strike on Friday. A medical source at Nasser Hospital, where Alaa Al-Najjar works, gave Adam’s age as 10 years old. Footage of the aftermath released by the civil defense agency showed rescuers recovering badly burned remains from the damaged home.

The children’s funeral took place at Nasser Hospital, AFP footage showed. Muneer Alboursh, director general of the health ministry in Gaza, said on X that the strike happened shortly after Hamdi Al-Najjar drove his wife to work. “Just minutes after returning home, a missile struck their house,” he said, adding the father was “in intensive care”. “This is the reality our medical staff in Gaza endure. Words fall short in describing the pain,” he said. “In Gaza, it is not only healthcare workers who are targeted – (the Zionist entity’s) aggression goes further, wiping out entire families.”

Zionist strikes killed at least 79 people on Saturday across the Palestinian territory, a toll that doesn’t include hospitals in the battered north that are now inaccessible. Bassal told AFP the dead included a couple who were killed with their two young children in a predawn strike on a house in the Amal quarter of the southern city of Khan Yunis.

To the west of the city, at least five people were killed by a drone strike on a crowd of people that had gathered to wait for aid trucks, he said. At Nasser Hospital, tearful mourners gathered around white-shrouded bodies outside. “Suddenly, a missile from an F-16 destroyed the entire house, and all of them were civilians — my sister, her husband and their children,” said Wissam Al-Madhoun. “We found them lying in the street. What did this child do to (Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu?”

The Zionist entity resumed operations in Gaza on March 18, ending a two-month ceasefire. Gaza’s health ministry said Saturday that at least 3,747 people had been killed in the territory since then, taking the war’s overall toll to 53,901, mostly civilians. United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said on Friday that Palestinians were enduring “the cruelest phase” of the war in Gaza, where a lengthy Zionist blockade has led to widespread shortages of food and medicine.

The Gaza City municipality, meanwhile, warned Saturday of “a potential large-scale water crisis” due to a lack of supplies needed for urgent repairs. It said damage from the war had “affected the majority of Gaza’s water infrastructure, leaving large portions of the population vulnerable to severe water shortages”. It added that temperatures were rising and demand was expected to increase. – Agencie