Israel strikes Gaza, killing 21 including women & children

Deir al-Balah: Israeli strikes pounded Gaza on Wednesday, killing at least 21 Palestinians, including two infants, and further rocking a fragile ceasefire deal, hospital officials said.

Israel said it was responding to a militant attack on Israeli soldiers that seriously wounded one.

Deadly Israeli strikes have repeatedly punctuated the truce since it came into effect on October 10, and the escalating Palestinian toll has made many in Gaza say it feels like the war is continuing unabated. Among the Palestinians killed Wednesday were five children, seven women and an on-duty paramedic, according to hospital officials.

“The genocidal war against our people in the Gaza Strip continues,” said Dr Mohamed Abu Selmiya, director of Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, in a Facebook post. “Where is the ceasefire? Where are the mediators?”

Israel strongly denies accusations that it is committing genocide in Gaza. The war began on October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led militants poured into southern Israel after a surprise barrage of rockets, killing 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and abducting 251.

The deal attempted to halt the more than 2-year-old war between Israel and Hamas. While the heaviest fighting has subsided, it has been marred by repeated flareups of violence.

A total of 556 Palestinians have been killed by Israel and 1,500 wounded since the ceasefire went into effect, according to Gaza health officials, while Israel’s military says four Israeli soldiers have been killed.

Israel’s military has said its continuing strikes are responses to Hamas violations or militant attacks on its soldiers, but dozens of civilians have died. Eight Arab and Muslim countries, including mediators Egypt and Qatar, recently condemned what they called Israel’s “repeated violations” of the deal.

An Israeli military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with military policy, told The Associated Press that

Israel’s latest attacks were in response to militant gunfire that badly wounded a reservist soldier

Wednesday morning.

Israeli troops fired on a building in the Tuffah neighborhood in north Gaza, killing at least 11 people, most from the same family, said Shifa Hospital, which received the bodies.

The dead included two parents, their 10-day-old girl, her 5-month-old cousin and the children’s grandmother.

Mourners gathered in the courtyard of Shifa hospital Wednesday morning for funeral prayers.

“What did this child do? …. Why are they killing the children?” asked a relative of the family, Mohammad Jaser.

“We don’t understand why this is happening to us. What do we do?

Where do we go? This isn’t life,” he said.

Two young children were seen kneeling at the body of their father as a woman told them to bid him farewell. A young girl kissed her father’s cheeks.

Later, an Israeli strike on a family’s tent in the southern city of Khan Younis killed three people including a 12-year-old boy, said Nasser Hospital, which

received the bodies. Tank shelling in Gaza City’s eastern neighborhood of Zaytoun killed another three Palestinians, according to Shifa Hospital.