War in the Gaza Strip: Dozens dead in attack on refugee town

Meanwhile, Shifa Hospital in Gaza city has been largely evacuated.

The UN-run Al-Fakhura school in Jabalia, which is used as refugee accommodation, was shelled early on Saturday, a ministry representative told the AFP news agency. 50 people were killed. According to ministry officials, 32 members of a family were killed in a second attack on another building.

19 children killed

Footage shared online showed bodies covered in dust and blood at Al-Fakhura school, where mattresses were spread out under school desks. The authenticity of the recordings could not be verified. The Health Ministry released a list with the names of all family members killed in the second attack. According to the information, 19 of the fatalities were children. The Israeli army did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Jabalia, in the north of the Gaza Strip, is the largest of eight refugee camps in the Palestinian territory that has grown into a city. More than 80 percent of the camp’s residents are refugees or descendants of refugees who left their homes when the State of Israel was founded in 1948.

At the beginning of November, the Hamas government said that Israeli bombings of the refugee camp had killed more than 200 people within three days. Hundreds more people were injured.

Shifa Hospital evacuated

Meanwhile, according to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health, there are only about 120 injured and an unspecified number of premature babies left in the Shifa Hospital, the largest clinic in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military had previously stated that the evacuation was taking place at the request of its director.

Hospital director Mohammed Abu Salmiya had previously said he had been instructed by the Israeli army to ensure “the evacuation of patients, injured, displaced people and medical personnel.” The army, on the other hand, emphasized that it had never ordered the evacuation of patients or medical staff, but had only granted the director’s “request” to enable the evacuation of more people from the hospital. The aim is to enable other people who sought protection in the clinic to “do so safely”. Medical staff will remain at the hospital to care for patients who cannot leave the clinic, it said.

Doctors included

According to the aid organization, Doctors Without Borders employees and their relatives are also trapped near the Shifa hospital. In total, there are 137 people, including 65 children, who are unable to leave the area safely because of the ongoing heavy fighting, the organization said on Saturday. Previous attempts to evacuate the employees and their families have failed.

For the fourth day in a row, the Israeli army searched the sprawling hospital complex, which they suspect is a command center for the Islamist Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip. According to UN figures, there were around 2,300 patients, injured and displaced people in the hospital before the latest evacuation.

Call for evacuation

Israel has been calling on people in Gaza and the northern Gaza Strip for weeks to flee to the south of the sealed-off coastal strip for security reasons. On Saturday, the army again called on residents of several neighborhoods in Gaza to evacuate. For their own safety, residents should flee the neighborhoods in the northern Gaza Strip to the south by 4 p.m. local time (3 p.m. CET), an army spokesman wrote on Saturday in Arabic on the X platform, formerly Twitter. Residents of the refugee district of Jabalia were also called to evacuate.

Civilians who were prevented from fleeing by the terrorist organization Hamas could contact the Israeli army by telephone or via the Telegram platform, it said. The army also announced a four-hour “tactical” pause in fighting in the Shabura refugee camp in Rafah, southern Gaza, for humanitarian reasons. The border crossing to Egypt is also in the area.

Attacks in the West Bank

In the West Bank, Israel’s army said it killed “several terrorists” in a refugee camp in the city of Nablus. The military announced on Saturday that an aircraft attacked their hiding place during the operation in Balata. According to Palestinian sources, five men were killed in the Israeli army’s drone strike on Saturday night. According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, two people were also injured.

According to the army, the killed Palestinians were planning attacks against Israeli civilians and military targets. One of the dead had already been involved in attacks in the past. During the raid on the refugee camp, attackers shot at the emergency services. According to the army, the soldiers returned fire.

According to a WAFA report, a Palestinian was also killed in confrontations during a raid by the Israeli military in Tubas in the north of the West Bank.

The situation in the West Bank has deteriorated significantly since the war between Israel and the Islamist Hamas, which rules in the Gaza Strip, began on October 7th. According to the Ministry of Health, around 200 Palestinians have been killed since then.

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