GAZA STRIP, JERUSALEM: Israeli strikes killed five people in Gaza on Friday, a week after a US delegation asked Israel to draw down attacks.
The civil defense agency said that the bodies of three people were recovered in pieces after Israeli strikes in the town of Al-Qarara, east of Khan Younis.
After evacuation warnings by Israel’s military, a strike hit a building in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.
FASTFACT
Israel has kept striking the Gaza Strip and its forces have made further inroads despite a US-brokered ceasefire announced in October.
One family was unable to flee and a 4-year-old child was killed, according to Awda Hospital, where he was taken. His mother and sister were wounded.
Israeli strikes hit three other buildings across the territory after residents said they received evacuation warnings. Some people sprinted away, with mothers carrying children, while others moved amid the rubble in wheelchairs or with canes.
Smoke rose over the already devastated landscape.
Israel’s military said it carried out strikes in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City and in Deir Al-Balah after issuing warnings, targeting what it described as two Hamas weapons storage facilities inside mosques.
The military did not provide evidence but said the facilities contained dozens of “Kalashnikov rifles, magazines and additional military equipment.”
An earlier Israeli strike on a tent in Deir Al-Balah killed a man, according to Al-Aqsa Hospital, where his body was taken. Israel’s military said it killed a militant affiliated with Hamas’ special forces unit.
A man was killed and five others were wounded in an Israeli strike in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, according to Nasser Hospital, which received the casualties.
And Israeli tank fire hit an area east of Khan Younis, killing a 10-year-old girl, according to the hospital, where her body was taken.
The latest deaths came the same day that Israel carried out a rare airstrike in the occupied West Bank, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying it killed militants planning attacks from the Palestinian territory.
Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative for Gaza under the “Board of Peace” said that deadly Israeli strikes made it hard for the people of Gaza to feel the ceasefire.
