CAIRO/GAZA March 9 — An Israeli airstrike and tank shelling killed six Palestinians, including two women and a girl, in separate attacks in Gaza City on Sunday, the deadliest incidents in Gaza since the United States (US)-Israeli assault on Iran began a week ago, said health officials.
Gaza City-based Al Shifa Hospital head Mohamed Abu Selmia said three men were killed in an airstrike near Al-Azhar University in western Gaza City: paramedic Mohammad Hamduna, and two others named as Mohammad Abu Shedeq and Ahmed Lafi.
The strike hit near crowded tent camps where Gazans were sheltering and wounded several other people.
Such attacks have declined since the start of the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, although Israeli forces have killed several Palestinians over the past week.
In a statement on Sunday, the Israeli military said the strike had killed two Hamas members who had been preparing to attack Israeli soldiers, without providing evidence. No militant group has claimed any of the men as members.
The Israeli military declined to comment in response to Reuters' request for evidence connecting the men to a potential attack.
Health officials at the Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat camp reported that a little after midnight in the central Gaza Strip, Israeli tank shelling killed at least three people, two women, including a local journalist, and a girl, and wounded 10 other people, some of them children.
Medics said the tank shells hit a tent encampment, housing displaced families in the western Nuseirat area. Two years of war turned most of the enclave into a wasteland and uprooted most of the territory's population of over two million.
On Monday, an Israeli security official told Reuters that the military was not aware of any incident in which a child and a journalist were killed by Israeli shelling.
Blankets stained with blood
Reuters footage showed Palestinians sifting through the tent encampments, checking damage to their shelters, and displaying blankets stained with blood, as some women sat and wept next to a white-shrouded body.
“We were sitting in our tents, sitting, and suddenly we saw something striking like red fire once, twice, and three times. We started running without knowing (where to go)," said Nisreen Abu Shalouf, whose daughter-in-law was killed in the strike.
"I found my daughter-in-law in the tent, I found her with her brain exposed...She was still a newlywed, I swear, she was a newlywed,” she told Reuters. Some of her children were also wounded.
Israel and Hamas agreed to a US-brokered Gaza ceasefire deal that kicked off in October last year, but violence has continued on a near-daily basis. Both sides have blamed the other for violating the truce agreement.
The Gaza Health Ministry said at least 640 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since October. Israel says four soldiers have been killed by militants in Gaza over the same period.
The local health authorities have stated that Gaza has been devastated by more than two years of an Israeli onslaught that killed over 72,000 Palestinians.
The war was sparked by Hamas's October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, where the militants killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
