GAZA: A Hamas health official said more than 80 people were killed Saturday in twin strikes on a northern Gaza refugee camp, including a UN school used as a shelter for people displaced by the Zionist-Hamas war. Social media videos showed bodies covered in blood and dust on the floor of a building, where mattresses had been wedged under school tables in Jabalia, the Palestinian territory’s biggest refugee camp.
The Zionist army’s relentless air and ground campaign has since killed at least 12,300 people, including 5,000 children, in Gaza. "At least 50 people” were killed in a Zionist strike at dawn on the UN-run Al-Fakhoura school in the camp, which had been converted into a shelter for displaced Palestinians, an official at Gaza’s health ministry told AFP.
According to UN figures, some 1.6 million people have been displaced inside Gaza by six weeks of fighting. A separate strike Saturday on another building in Jabalia camp killed 32 people from the same family, 19 of them children, the official said. The ministry released a list of 32 members of the Abu Habal family who had died. Contacted by AFP, the Zionist army did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the two strikes.
The Zionist entity has told Palestinians to move from north Gaza for their safety, but deadly air strikes continued to hit central and southern areas of the narrow coastal territory. "They said the south was safer, so we moved,” Azhar Al-Rifi told AFP. Her family was caught in a strike at the Nuseirat refugee camp on Friday, killing seven of her relatives including her five-year-old nephew. The same blast caught up Nada Abu Hiya, aged eight – her third bombing of the war. "There are bombings everywhere,” she said. "My grandmother is dead, my mother is dead, my grandfather is dead, my uncle is dead, they destroyed our house. Our neighbors’ house is also destroyed and they are all dead.”
On Saturday, hundreds of people fled on foot after the director of Gaza’s main hospital said the Zionist army ordered evacuation of the facility where some 2,000 people were trapped. Columns of sick and injured — some of them amputees — were seen making their way out of Al-Shifa hospital towards the seafront without ambulances along with displaced people, doctors and nurses, as loud explosions were heard around the facility.
On the way, an AFP journalist saw at least 15 bodies, some in advanced stages of decomposition, along a road lined by badly damaged shops and overturned vehicles, as Zionist drones buzzed overhead. The Gaza health ministry said 120 wounded, along with an unspecified number of premature babies, were still at Al-Shifa hospital that has become the focus of the recent fighting. The Zionist entity has been pressing military operations inside the hospital, searching for the Hamas operations center it says lies under the sprawling complex — a charge Hamas denies.
In Gaza City, Zionist troops had called over loudspeakers to evacuate Al-Shifa "in the next hour”, an AFP journalist at the hospital reported. They also called the hospital’s director, Mohammed Abu Salmiya, telling him to ensure "the evacuation of patients, wounded, the displaced and medical staff, and that they should move on foot towards the seafront”, he said.
According to Ahmed El Mokhallalati, a doctor at the hospital, "most of the medical staff and patients had left” but he was staying at Al-Shifa along with five other doctors. Despite the evacuation order, "many patients cannot leave the hospital as they are in the ICU beds or the baby incubators,” Mokhallalati said on X, formerly Twitter. The United Nations estimated 2,300 patients, staff and displaced Palestinians were sheltering at Al-Shifa before Zionist troops entered it on Wednesday.
The Zionist entity has imposed a siege on Gaza, allowing just a trickle of aid in from Egypt but barring most shipments of fuel over concerns Hamas could divert supplies for military purposes. A first consignment of fuel entered Gaza after the Zionist entity’s war cabinet bowed to pressure from its ally the United States and agreed to let in two diesel tankers a day.
A two-day blackout caused by fuel shortages ended after a first delivery arrived from Egypt late Friday, but UN officials continued to plead for a ceasefire, warning no part of Gaza is safe. A strike on a residential building in southern Gaza killed 26 people, the director of the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis said. "I was asleep and we were surprised by the strike. At least 20 bombs were dropped,” Imed Al-Mubasher, 45, told AFP. His wife Sabrin Mussa said she "saw human remains everywhere” and screamed for help.
The UN said the Zionist entity had agreed to allow in 60,000 liters of fuel daily from Egypt starting Saturday, but warned it was little more than a third of what is needed to keep hospitals, water and sanitation facilities running. Thomas White of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said the Zionist entity had "only permitted 50 percent of the daily fuel requirement for lifesaving humanitarian aid”.
US President Joe Biden’s chief adviser for the Middle East said more fuel deliveries and a potential "significant pause” in the fighting both depend of the release of hostages. "The surge in humanitarian relief, the surge in fuel, the pause... will come when hostages are released,” Brett McGurk told a security conference in Bahrain.
The Zionist entity has come under scrutiny for targeting hospitals in north Gaza, but says the facilities are being used by Hamas — a claim rejected by the group and medical staff. More than half of Gaza’s hospitals are no longer functional due to combat, damage or shortages, and people are waiting four to six hours for half the normal portion of bread. The Zionist entity has not recovered captives at the hospital but said it found not far away the bodies of two kidnapped women including a soldier.
Meanwhile, five fighters in the armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party were killed early Saturday in a rare Zionist airstrike on a camp in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Red Crescent and Fatah sources said. Zionist army raids targeting Palestinian militant movements in the West Bank have surged since Oct 7.
The Balata refugee camp in Nablus is considered a militant hotspot and hosts fighters from Hamas, their ally Islamic Jihad, and the Fatah party, which leads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, occupied by the Zionist entity since 1967. The Palestine Red Crescent Society said overnight five people were killed and two hurt in a strike, which the camp administration said hit local Fatah headquarters.
Witnesses told AFP the strike appeared to have come from a drone, and Fatah sources confirmed the dead were members of the movement founded by Yasser Arafat. Witnesses said Zionist forces entered the camp on foot after the airstrike and destroyed an empty house without causing further casualties. The airstrike came a day after the Zionist entity’s army said it had killed at least seven Palestinians in two separate confrontations in the West Bank.
Five were killed in the Jenin refugee camp, the military said, adding two "assailants” were also killed near Hebron after opening fire on soldiers. Until now Jenin — considered the main militant hotspot in the West Bank — was the only location in the occupied territory to witness airstrikes since the Zionist-Hamas war started. The Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah says since the war started, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, with a spike in army raids and Zionist settler violence. – AFP