At least four missiles hit overcrowded area in attack that Israel says targeted a Hamas command centre
Israeli airstrikes on al-Mawasi “humanitarian zone” in the Gaza Strip have killed at least 40 people and injured another 60, according to witnesses and medical officials in the blockaded Palestinian territory.
At least four missiles hit the overcrowded supposed “safe zone” on the coast in central Gaza in the early hours of Tuesday, causing dozens of tents to catch fire and leaving craters of as deep as 9 metres, the civil emergency service said. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people are sheltering in Mawasi, where conditions are dire, after being ordered to move there by the Israeli military.
“Entire families disappeared in the Mawasi Khan Younis massacre, under the sand, in deep holes,” the Gaza civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Bassal told Agence France-Presse.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they had “struck significant Hamas terrorists who were operating within a command and control centre embedded inside the humanitarian area in Khan Younis”.
Among the targets were two men it said were involved in Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel that triggered the war: Samer Abu Daqqa, the head of Hamas’s aerial unit, and Osama Tabesh, the head of the observation and targets department in Hamas’s intelligence unit.
“The terrorists advanced and carried out terror attacks against IDF troops and the state of Israel”, it said. Hamas has denied that any fighters or commanders were present in the area.
