Agencies
Palestinian Territories
As many as 69 people have been killed and 136 injured in the Gaza Strip over the past 48 hours as a result of Israeli strikes, the enclave’s health ministry said on Saturday.
“In the past 48 hours, the Israeli occupation has carried out five massacres of families in the Gaza Strip, with 69 dead and 136 injured admitted to hospitals,” the ministry said in a statement. The death toll from Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip has reached 40,074 since October 2023, with 92,537 people injured, the ministry added.
The Israeli military bombed a warehouse sheltering displaced Palestinians in the az-Zawayda area of central Gaza, killing 15 members of one family, including nine children.
The civil defence spokesman in Gaza, Mahmoud Basal, said on Saturday that 15 people killed in the overnight attack were members of the Ajlah family, with three women among the dead. The total death toll from the attack was 16.
Abdalhadi al-Ejlah, a Palestinian who lost 15 members of his family in the strike on az-Zawayda in the Gaza Strip, spoke to Al Jazeera from Stockholm, Sweden.
He described his 45-year-old brother Sami, who died in the strike, as “an honourable man” who had built up a frozen meat business and was engaged in charitable causes, leading to him being known as “the father of the poor”.
He described his family as “normal” and like all Palestinians in Gaza simply being “subjected to this genocide”.
Meanwhile, Israel issued yet another round of evacuation orders on Saturday, this time for neighbourhoods in central Gaza’s Maghazi refugee camp.
The Israel military’s Arabic-language spokesman, Avichay Adraee, made the announcement in a social media post, listing blocks in Maghazi, as well as several other neighbourhoods in central Gaza, from which residents should flee.
It is the third time Israel has ordered more Gaza neighbourhoods to evacuate in as many days, displacing tens of thousands. Israeli forces also ordered people to flee the vicinity of Beit Hanoon city in northern Gaza.
