DEIR AL BALAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli airstrikes in the center Gaza The bombing of a hospital in northern Gaza killed at least 14 people, including children, on Sunday, Palestinian health officials said, while half a dozen patients were injured.
The Israeli army is continuing its latest offensive against Hamas militants in northern Gaza, whose remaining Palestinians have been almost completely cut off from the rest of the territory amid a growing humanitarian crisis.
An airstrike flattened a residential building in the Bureij urban refugee camp on Sunday afternoon, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the neighboring town of Deir al-Balah, where the wounded were taken.
At least nine people were killed, including six children and a woman. An Associated Press reporter viewed the bodies at the hospital morgue.
Earlier on Sunday, another Israeli strike hit a tent in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least five people, including two parents and their two children, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said.
In northern Gaza, the health ministry said a bombing had targeted the Indonesian hospital injuring six patients, one seriously. It is the largest hospital north of Gaza City.
“We demand international protection for hospitals, patients and medical staff,” the ministry said in a statement that also calls for safe passage to and from hospitals, more medical supplies, fuel and safe evacuation injured people.
The Israeli military said Sunday evening that it was not aware of any attacks on the Indonesian hospital “in the last three or four hours.”
Meanwhile, the army said it briefly closed the key Kerem Shalom crossing after fighters lobbed mortar shells several meters from the nearby humanitarian corridor towards its troops. He said Gaza’s main goods crossing had been reopened after those who had fired were “eliminated”, while adding that the arrival and distribution of humanitarian aid had been delayed.
Kerem Shalom is the only crossing between Israel and Gaza designed for the transport of goods and has been the main artery for aid delivery since the closure of the Rafah crossing with Egypt in May. Last month, almost two-thirds of the aid entering Gaza went through Kerem Shalom.
A second cold and rainy winter begins in Gaza, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in squalid tent camps and dependent on international aid.
The war in Gaza began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping around 250 people. Around a hundred hostages are still in Gaza, at least a third of whom are believed to have died.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive killed more than 45,600 Palestinians in Gaza, more than half of whom were women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which did not specify how many were fighters. The Israeli army claims to have killed more than 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.
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