GAZA, Feb 4 — Israeli tank shelling and airstrikes killed 23 Palestinians, including seven children, in Palestine’s Gaza today, health officials said, the latest violence to undermine a truce in the enclave.
Among the dead was a medic who rushed to help victims of a strike in the southern city of Khan Younis and was then killed by a second attack on the same location, health officials said.
Other strikes hit Gaza City in the north, where health officials said a five-month-old boy was killed. The attacks come three days after Israel reopened Gaza’s main border crossing with Egypt, a major step in the United States-backed truce.
“While we were sleeping in our house, the tank shelled us and the shells hit our house. Our children were martyred; my son was martyred, my brother’s son and daughter were martyred... We have nothing to do with anything, we are peaceful people,” said Abu Mohamed Habouch, speaking at a funeral for his family.
Tents in Mawasi, a coastal area near Khan Younis crowded with Gazans displaced by the conflict, had been ripped apart by the strikes. Nearly all of Gaza’s population of over two million has been forced to flee their homes.
The Israeli military said it had launched the strikes in response to militants opening fire against Israeli troops operating near its armistice line with Hamas. A later statement said one of the strikes had targeted a senior Hamas commander.
It said an Israeli soldier was severely injured by the militant fire, which it described as a violation of the ceasefire agreement.
Hamas said Israel’s action undermined efforts to stabilise the ceasefire. In a statement, the group called for “immediate international pressure to halt violations”.
Rafah reopening
Palestinian patients preparing to cross through the newly opened Rafah crossing to Egypt were told that Israel had postponed the passage of patients through the border. Since then, Palestinian health authorities said that the group of patients were on their way to the border.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza, COGAT, said the Rafah crossing remained open, but it had not received necessary details from the World Health Organisation (WHO) to facilitate crossings. The WHO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
An Egyptian security source told Reuters that Israel had cited security issues in the Rafah area as the reason for the temporary closure, but those had since been resolved and work had resumed at the border.
Reopening the crossing was one of the requirements under the October ceasefire that set out the first phase of US President Donald Trump’s plan to stop fighting between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants.
Sixteen patients from Gaza and 40 of their escorts crossed into Egypt yesterday, Gazan medics told Reuters. A Hamas police source told Reuters that at least 40 people crossed from Egypt to Gaza late yesterday.
On January 31, before the Rafah reopening, Israeli strikes killed more than 30 Palestinians in Gaza. The military said it launched those strikes after gunmen emerged from a tunnel in a Gaza area under Israeli control.
Second phase of ceasefire
In January, Trump declared the start of the second phase of the ceasefire in which the sides would negotiate the shattered enclave’s future governance and reconstruction.
Key issues like the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the over 50 per cent of Gaza they currently occupy and the disarmament of Hamas remain unresolved, while the fragile ceasefire has been marked by near-daily violence.
Since the start of the ceasefire, Israeli fire has killed nearly 560 people, most of them civilians, according to Gaza health officials. Palestinian militants have killed four Israeli soldiers in the same period, according to Israeli authorities.
Israel’s two-year offensive on the Gaza Strip killed more than 71,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health authorities, displaced most of its population, and left much of the strip in ruins.
The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack that triggered the war killed around 1,200 people in Israel, according to Israeli tallies.
