Emergency services in the Gaza Strip reported Thursday 12 deaths, including at least three children, in Israeli strikes on the Palestinian territory devastated by more than 15 months of war between Hamas and Israel.
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A father and three of his daughters were killed in an overnight airstrike on their home in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, Civil Defense said.
Rescuer Mahmoud Awad said he extracted two of the three sisters, Tala and Najwa, aged 6 and 7, from the rubble of the house, as well as their father, Mohamed Abou Kharouf.
“The bodies were in tatters. It’s a disaster,” he says. “The place was completely destroyed and the drones were shooting every now and then.”
According to Gazan emergency services, another Israeli air strike, on a house in Jabalia, in the north of the Palestinian coastal strip, left eight dead and several injured.
The Israeli army has intensified its ground and air offensive in the north of the Gaza Strip since October 6, claiming to want to prevent fighters from the Islamist movement Hamas from regrouping there.
The violence continues while indirect negotiations between Hamas and Israel resumed last weekend in Qatar with a view to a ceasefire agreement, which would be “very close” according to American diplomacy.
The war in Gaza was triggered by an unprecedented attack by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,200 people on the Israeli side, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count based on official figures.
Nearly 46,000 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli military campaign of reprisals on the Gaza Strip, mainly civilians, according to data from the Hamas government’s Health Ministry, deemed reliable by the UN.
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