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ReutersIsraeli air strikes and gunfire in the Gaza Strip on Monday killed at least five Palestinians, including two children, according to health officials.
Medics and relatives said a 10-year-old girl was shot dead while inside her family’s tent in the southern city of Khan Younis.
A four-year-old boy was meanwhile killed in an air strike in Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.
The Israeli military said it was not aware of the incident in Khan Younis, but that it had issued an evacuation order in Bureij before carrying out a strike on what it described as a Hamas weapons storage facility.
At least 1,296 Palestinians, including 300 children, have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect last October, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
The Israeli military says four of its soldiers have been killed in Palestinian attacks in Gaza over the same period.
Anadolu via Getty ImagesAmal Abu Khater, 10, was hit by a bullet in her back while eating in her tent in the central al-Sattar al-Gharbi area of Khan Younis on Monday, according to her family. They rushed the girl to hospital but medics told them on arrival that she had died of her wounds.
“She was eating sweets,” her grandmother, Samira Abu Labda, told Reuters news agency. “Why did she have to die like this? What wrong did this child do?”
In Bureij, Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said its first responders recovered the body of four-year-old Hassan al-Qatrawi from beneath the rubble of his family’s home following an air strike on a neighbouring building. His mother and sister were pulled out alive.
Pictures of the aftermath showed people clambering over a large crater and searching nearby piles of concrete and metal.
The Israeli military said it had ordered residents to evacuate the area before the strike, and that the target was one of five Hamas weapons storage facilities and a launch site that were bombed in central and northern Gaza on Monday.
It alleged that the facilities had been “established inside mosques and alongside humanitarian infrastructure” in violation of international law.
One of the mosques that was struck was in the town of Deir al-Balah, just south of Bureij.
Aerial video footage released by the military appeared to show a large explosion destroying two structures adjoining the main prayer hall.
At the scene on Tuesday, resident Mohammed Abu Amra rejected the claim that the mosque had been used to store weapons.
“They are bombing the book of our Lord,” he said while holding up a damaged Quran.
ReutersThe UN’s humanitarian office also said that three UN warehouses in Deir al-Balah were damaged in an air strike on Monday, one of them significantly.
In the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of Gaza City, to the north, residents said a water desalination plant was bombed at a time when they were suffering from water shortages.
The Israeli military said it targeted a Hamas weapons storage facilities near the plant.
Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem condemned the attack, calling it a “further attempt to deprive [Gaza’s population] of all means of survival”.
At least three other people were killed in Israeli strikes across Gaza on Monday.
Among them were two brothers, Mohammed and Ibrahim Abu Asad, whose tent in Deir al-Balah was bombed overnight, according to Palestinian media.
The Israeli military said Mohammed was an operative in Hamas’s elite Nukhba force who had taken part in the 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, when about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.
Israel responded to the attack by launching a military campaign in Gaza, during which more than 73,430 people have been killed, according to the territory’s health ministry.
Israel-Gaza warPalestinian territoriesIsraelHamas
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