GAZA CITY: Israeli strikes killed at least 19 people in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, including a rescue worker, health officials said, as troops deepened an incursion along the territory’s northern edge, bombarding a hospital and blowing up homes.
Medics said at least 12 people were killed in an Israeli strike on a house in the area of Jabalia in northern Gaza earlier on Wednesday, and at least 10 people remained missing as rescue operations continued, Reuters reported. Another man was killed in tank shelling nearby, they said.
Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, one of three medical facilities partially operational in the territory’s north, said the hospital “was bombed across all its departments without warning, as we were trying to save an injured person in the intensive care unit” on Tuesday.
“Following the arrest of 45 members of the medical and surgical staff and the denial of entry to a replacement team, we are now losing wounded patients daily who could have survived if resources were available,” he told Reuters in a text message.
“Unfortunately, food and water are not allowed to enter, and not even a single ambulance is permitted access to the north.”
Israeli operations in Gaza have focused for weeks on the northern part of the territory, where the military has laid siege to three major towns and ordered residents to flee.
Palestinians say Israel appears determined to permanently depopulate the area to create a buffer zone along the northern edge of Gaza, which Israel denies, Reuters reported.
According to Gaza’s health ministry, the Israeli military campaign has killed nearly 44,000 people and displaced nearly all the enclave’s population at least once since the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas.
Although Israel’s assaults have been focused on the towns on the northern edge since last month, its strikes have continued across the territory.
In the Sabra suburb of Gaza City, the Palestinian civil emergency service said an Israeli air strike targeted one of its teams during a rescue operation, killing one staff member and wounding three others. In the nearby Zeitoun neighborhood an Israeli strike on a house killed two people, medics said.
The death in Sabra raised the number of civil emergency service members killed since. Oct 7, 2023, to 87, the service said.
There was no immediate Israeli comment on the incidents.
In Rafah, in the south, medics said three men were killed and others wounded in two separate Israeli air strikes.
Speaking during a visit to Gaza on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Hamas would not rule the Palestinian enclave after the war had ended and that Israel had destroyed the Palestinian group’s military capabilities.
Netanyahu also said Israel had not given up trying to locate the 101 remaining hostages believed to be still in the enclave, and he offered a $5 million reward for the return of each one.
Hamas wants a deal that ends the war, while Netanyahu has vowed the war can end only once Hamas is eradicated.
