A barrage of Israeli airstrikes leveled apartment buildings in a refugee camp near Gaza City on Tuesday, with rescuers clawing through the destruction to pull men, women and children from the rubble. Israel said the strike, which targeted a senior Hamas military leader, destroyed a militant command center and an underground tunnel network, reports UNB.
The toll from the attack in the Jabaliya camp was not immediately known. The director of the nearby hospital where casualties were taken, Dr. Atef Al-Kahlot, said hundreds of people were wounded or killed, but he did not provide exact figures.
The Israeli military said dozens of militants were killed, including a key Hamas commander for northern Gaza.
Israel aggressively defended the attack, with military spokesman Jonathan Conricus saying the targeted commander had also been a key planner of the bloody Oct. 7 rampage that started the war, and that the apartment buildings collapsed only because the vast underground Hamas complex had been destroyed.
The strike underlined the anticipated surge in casualties on both sides as Israeli troops battling Hamas militants advance deeper into the northern Gaza Strip toward dense, residential neighborhoods. Israel has vowed to crush Hamas’ ability to govern Gaza or threaten Israel following the Oct. 7 assault, which ignited the war. Hamas, an Islamic militant group, openly calls for the destruction of Israel.
Israel said two of its soldiers were killed in fighting in northern Gaza, the first military deaths it reported since the ground offensive into the tiny Mediterranean territory accelerated late last week.
Several hundred thousand Palestinians remain in northern Gaza in the path of the ground assault. They have crowded into homes or are packed by the thousands into hospitals that are already overwhelmed with patients and running low on supplies.
In the Jabaliya refugee camp — a densely built-up area of small streets on Gaza City’s outskirts — dozens of rescuers searched for survivors amid a series of obliterated buildings and others that had partially collapsed.
Young men carried the limp forms of two children from the upper floors of the crumbling frame of one damaged apartment building, while helping down another child and woman. It was unclear whether the children were alive or dead. Gray dust, apparently left by pulverized concrete, seemed to coat nearly everything.
The Israeli military said it carried out a wide-scale strike in Jabaliya on Hamas infrastructure “that had taken over civilian buildings.”
Brig. Gen. Daniel Hagari said an underground Hamas installation beneath a targeted building collapsed, toppling other nearby buildings. Conricus later said the main strike had hit between buildings.
Bd-pratidin English/Tanvir Raihan
