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An Israeli strike on a five-story building sheltering displaced Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip killed at least 60 people on Tuesday, more than half of them women and children, Gaza’s Health Ministry said.
Israel has carried out more airstrikes and waged a bigger ground operation in northern Gaza in recent weeks, saying it is focused on rooting out pockets of Hamas militants that have regrouped there after more than a year of war. But the intense fighting is raising alarm about the worsening humanitarian conditions for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still in northern Gaza.
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Concerns about not enough aid reaching Gaza were amplified Monday when Israeli lawmakers passed two laws to cut ties with the main U.N. agency distributing food, water and medicine, and to ban it from Israeli soil. Israel controls access to both Gaza and the occupied West Bank, and it was unclear how the agency known by the acronym UNRWA would continue its work in either place.
“The humanitarian operation in Gaza, if that is unraveled, that is a disaster within a series of disasters and just doesn’t bear thinking about,” said UNRWA spokesperson John Fowler. He said other U.N. agencies and international organizations distributing aid in Gaza rely on its logistics and thousands of workers.
In Lebanon, the militant group Hezbollah said Tuesday it has chosen Sheikh Naim Kassem to succeed longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike last month. Hezbollah, which has fired rockets into Israel since the start of the war in Gaza, vowed to continue with Nasrallah’s policies “until victory is achieved.”
A short while later, eight Austrian soldiers serving in the U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon were reported lightly injured in a midday missile strike.
The peacekeeping force, which goes by the acronym UNIFIL, said the rocket that struck its headquarters in Lebanon was “likely” fired by Hezbollah, as it came from the north, and that it struck a vehicle workshop.
Austrian Defense Minister Klaudia Tanner “condemns this attack in the strongest terms and calls on all sides immediately to cease combat operations in the surroundings of the U.N. mission’s positions,” ministry spokesperson Michael Bauer wrote on the social network X.
The Gaza Health Ministry’s emergency service said at least 12 women and 20 children, including babies, were among the dead in Tuesday’s strike in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya. A mother and her five children — some of them adults — and a second mother with six children, were among the dead, according to an initial casualty list provided by the emergency service.
The toll from the strike was announced by Dr. Marwan al-Hams, director of the field hospitals’ department at the Health Ministry. He said another 17 people are missing.
The nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was overwhelmed by the wave of wounded people from the strike, according to its director, Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya. Israeli forces raided the medical facility over the weekend, detaining dozens of medics.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military regarding the strike in Beit Lahiya.
