Gaza's civil defence agency said an Israeli air strike in the early hours on Saturday killed 15 members of a Palestinian family, including nine children and three women.The strike hit the home of the Ajlah family in Al-Zawaida neighbourhood of central Gaza, civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said."The toll from the Israeli strike on the Ajlah family home and their warehouse in Al-Zawaida is 15 dead," Bassal said.A witness said the strike took place shortly after midnight (2100 GMT Friday)."Three rockets hit the house directly," Ahmed Abu al-Ghoul told AFP as rescuers pulled bodies from the rubble of the flattened house.More than 10 months of war between Israel and Hamas has left vast swathes of Gaza in ruins.Israel's military campaign has killed at least 40,074 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry.Meanwhile, Israel has issued new evacuation orders.Israel's military spokesperson posted instructions in Arabic on X for people in parts of central Gaza, including in the Maghazi district which is near Zawayda, to evacuate to a designated humanitarian zone. Residents said thousands were streaming out of Maghazi.On Friday, two sections of the southern city of Khan Younis within what Israel has designated as a humanitarian zone were deemed dangerous by the military, which ordered people to evacuate them, saying militants had been regularly firing rockets from there.The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Friday's orders, which also included other areas of the enclave outside the humanitarian zones, had affected around 170,000 displaced people."This is one of the largest evacuation orders affecting the zone to date and it shrinks the size of the so-called 'humanitarian area' to about 41 sqkm, or 11% of the total area of the Gaza Strip," an OCHA report said.In the central part of the enclave, residents said Israeli tanks advanced further yesterday into the eastern area of Deir Al-Balah, an area they had not invaded before, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are sheltering.Most of Gaza's 2.3mn population has been displaced by the 10-month-old Israeli offensive, which has laid waste to much of the enclave.
August 17, 2024 | 11:45 PM