Voice of America
19 Nov 2023, 05:36 GMT+10
Latest Developments:
Dozens of displaced civilians were killed or wounded Saturday in an Israeli airstrike on a school in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees reported.
'The scenes were horrifying. Corpses of women and children were on the ground. Others were screaming for help,' wounded survivor Ahmed Radwan told The Associated Press by phone of Israel's attack on the camp's Fakhoura school.
AP photos from a local hospital showed more than 20 bodies wrapped in bloodstained sheets.
'These attacks cannot become commonplace, they must stop. A humanitarian cease-fire cannot wait any longer,' UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini posted Saturday morning on the social media platform X.
The Israeli military, which had warned Jabaliya residents and others in a social media post in Arabic to leave, said only that its troops were active in the Jabaliya area 'with the aim of hitting terrorists' while trying to minimize civilian harm.
Israeli airstrikes killed at least 47 people in southern Gaza on Saturday, medics said, as Israel is expanding its assault on Hamas.
Early Saturday, an airstrike on two apartment buildings in Khan Younis killed 26 Palestinians and wounded 23, health officials said. Six more were killed a few kilometers north when a house in the town of Deir Al-Balah was bombed, health officials said.
Fifteen Palestinians died Saturday afternoon in a house west of Khan Younis near a shelter for displaced people, medics and witnesses said.
'We're asking people to relocate'
Israel had issued new warnings Friday for Palestinians in the southern city of Khan Younis to relocate, indicating a possible expansion of its war against Hamas into areas of the Gaza Strip where Israeli officials earlier had told people it was safe to stay.
'We're asking people to relocate,' Mark Regev, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told MSNBC. 'I know it's not easy for many of them, but we don't want to see civilians caught up in the crossfire.'
Earlier Saturday, patients, staff and displaced people evacuated northern Gaza's Shifa Hospital, the city's largest medical center. A witness described a panicked and chaotic evacuation as Israeli forces searched and scanned the faces of men among the evacuees, the AP reported.
'We left at gunpoint,' Mahmoud Abu Auf told AP by phone. 'Tanks and snipers were everywhere inside and outside.' He said he saw Israeli forces detain three men.
Israel's military has been searching Shifa Hospital for traces of a Hamas command center that it alleges was located under the building - a claim Hamas and the hospital staff deny.
Hospital lacks water, food, fuel, medicine
The evacuation, which Israel says was voluntary, left behind only Israeli forces and a skeleton crew of health workers to care for those too sick to move.
Palestinian Health Minister Mai al-Kaila said about 125 war-wounded or sick patients, as well as 34 newborn babies along with a small number of doctors and nurses, remain at Shifa.
Shifa 'is now without fuel, without food, without medicine, without food, without water - this means killing them (patients),' she told a news conference in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The Israeli army, however, said it had agreed to a request from the hospital director to assist with voluntary evacuations. Doctors could stay to care for patients too weak to leave. It also said it had transferred more than 6,000 liters of water and more than 2,300 kilograms of food to the hospital.
Internet, phone service restored
Internet and phone service was restored to the Gaza Strip on Saturday, ending a telecommunications outage the Palestinian telecommunications company Paltel said. The outage had forced the United Nations to shut down critical aid deliveries.
Palestinian authorities in Gaza now say more than 12,000 people - about 5,000 of them children - have been killed since Israel launched a major air and ground offensive in response to the October 7 Hamas terror attack that killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel. Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., U.K, EU and others.
The United Nations deems those figures credible, though they have not been updated since November 10 because of the collapse of services and communications at hospitals in northern Gaza.
Israel said 57 of its soldiers had been killed in Gaza since it entered the territory.
VOA United Nations correspondent Margaret Besheer contributed to this report. Some information for this article came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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