RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — An Israeli airstrike on a house in Gaza’s southernmost city killed at least nine people, six of them children, hospital authorities said Saturday, as Israel pursued its nearly seven-month offensive in the besieged Palestinian territory.
Strip An Israeli airstrike on a house in Gaza’s southernmost city killed at least nine people, six of them children, hospital authorities said Saturday, as Israel pursued its nearly seven-month offensive in the besieged Palestinian territory.
Israel’s war against the Islamic militant group Hamas has led to a dramatic escalation of tensions in an already volatile Middle East.
The strike late Friday hit a residential building in the western Tel Sultan neighborhood of the city of Rafah, according to Gaza’s civil defense. The casualties were initially transferred to the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah, and later the bodies of the six children, two women and a man were taken to Rafah’s Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital, where the area’s main morgue is located, the hospital’s records showed.
At al-Najjar, relatives sobbed and hugged the bodies of the children, wrapped in white shrouds, as others tried to comfort them.
The fatalities included Abdel-Fattah Sobhi Radwan, his wife Najlaa Ahmed Aweidah and their three children, his brother-in-law Ahmed Barhoum said. Barhoum also lost his wife, Rawan Radwan, and their 5-year-old daughter Alaa.
«This is a world devoid of all human values and morals,” Barhoum told The Associated Press Saturday morning, crying as he cradled and gently rocked the shroud-wrapped body of Alaa in his arms. “They bombed a house full of displaced people, women and children. The only martyrs were women and children.”
No victims were registered from a second overnight strike in the city. Later Saturday, an Israeli airstrike in central Gaza hit a house in the urban refugee camp of Bureji, killing at least one man and injuring two others, according to authorities at the al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in the city of Deir al-Balah, where an Associated Press journalist saw the casualties.
Rafah, which lies on the border with Egypt, currently hosts more than half of Gaza’s total population of about 2.3 million people, the vast majority of whom have been displaced by fighting elsewhere.
