KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — An Israeli airstrike crashed into a residential building next to the main medical center in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, wounding at least seven people, hospital authorities and witnesses said on Wednesday.
The Nasser Hospital is located in the western part of the city, which is within the Israeli-designated humanitarian “safe zone” where Palestinians have been told to go, according to maps provided by the Israeli military. He latest Israeli evacuation order It affected about 250,000 people earlier this week in large areas of Gaza, the United Nations estimated.
As dust from Wednesday’s attack billowed across a street near Nasser Hospital, an Associated Press contributor filmed people running in all directions, some running toward the destruction and others away. The men were carrying two young children, apparently injured. Later, civil defense rescuers and passersby picked their way through chunks of cement and twisted metal, searching for people who might have been buried.
Displaced families who were ordered to leave eastern Khan Younis on Monday have struggled to find places to live in overcrowded shelters and open areas in the western part of the city. Wednesday’s airstrike hit an area that also includes a school converted into a shelter for displaced people, many of whom live in makeshift tents.
“We were sitting in this tent, three of us, and we were shocked by the rubble and dust,” said one man, Jalal Lafi, displaced from the southern city of Rafah.
“The house was bombed without warning, hit by two missiles in a row, one after the other,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the rubble, his hair and clothes covered in gray soot.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the attack.
Andrea De Domenico, head of the U.N. humanitarian office for the Palestinian territories, said Gaza is “the only place in the world where people cannot find safe haven and cannot leave the front line.” Even in the so-called safe zones there are bombings, he told reporters Wednesday in Jerusalem.
An Israeli airstrike on Tuesday killed a prominent Palestinian doctor and eight members of his extended family, just hours after they complied with military orders to evacuate their home and move to the safe zone designated by Israel.
Most Palestinians seeking safety head to a coastal area called Muwasi or the nearby city of Deir al-Balah, De Domenico said.
The Israeli military said Tuesday it estimates that at least 1.8 million Palestinians are now in the humanitarian zone it declared, covering a stretch of about 14 kilometers (8.6 miles) along the Mediterranean. Much of that area is now covered in tent camps lacking health and medical facilities with limited access to aid, the UN and humanitarian groups say. Families live in the middle Mountains of garbage and streams contaminated by sewage..
It has been “a big challenge” to even get food to those areas, De Domenico said. Although the UN can now meet basic needs in northern Gaza, he said it is very difficult to get aid to the south. Israel says it is allowing aid through the Kerem Shalom crossing into southern Gaza and blames the UN for not doing enough to move the aid.
The UN says the fighting, Israeli military restrictions and general chaos (including criminal gangs removing aid from trucks in Gaza) make it almost impossible for aid workers to pick up truckloads of goods that Israel has let in.
The amount of food and other supplies arriving in Gaza has plummeted since the Israeli offensive in Rafah began two months ago, causing widespread hunger and sparking fears of famine.
“It’s an unbearable life,” said Anwar Salman, a displaced Palestinian. “If they want to kill us, let them do it. Let them launch a nuclear bomb and finish us off. We are tired. We are tired. “We are dying every day.”
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Associated Press journalists Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Samy Magdy in Cairo and Drew Callister in New York contributed.
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