Agencies
Palestinian Territories
At least 14 people – including women and children – have been killed in an Israeli air attack on a school-turned-shelter in Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian Civil Defence said the attack targetted the al-Jaouni school in the camp. Officials from Awda Hospital in Nuseirat said they received 10 dead from the strike and another four bodies were brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the nearby town of Deir el-Balah. At least 18 people were wounded in the attack.
One of the children killed was the daughter of Momin Selmi, a member of Gaza’s civil defence agency, which works to rescue the wounded and retrieve bodies after Israeli strikes.
Selmi hadn’t seen his daughter for 10 months as he remained in northern Gaza to keep working while his family fled south seeking safety, the agency said in a statement.
Meanwhile, five Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli air strike in the north of the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said a drone targeted a group of five young men near a mosque in the city of Tubas at dawn on Wednesday, and an ambulance crew transferred the bodies to the local government hospital.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the aircraft struck a “terrorist cell” armed with explosives during a counter-terrorism operation by security forces in Tubas and the nearby town of Tamun.
Later, an Israeli soldier was killed in what the IDF said was a ramming attack involving a fuel tanker elsewhere in the West Bank. The IDF said “a terrorist driving a Palestinian truck” near the Jewish settlement of Givat Assaf “accelerated towards forces conducting operational activity”.
Soldiers and an armed civilian then “neutralized” the driver at the scene, it added.
Israeli media posted video footage showing a tanker veering off a busy road at high speed before hitting a bus stop. They also identified the driver as a Palestinian man from Rafat.
Rafat’s council leader told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper that he knew the driver and did not believe it was an attack, but rather a case of him losing control of the tanker.
There has been a spike in violence in the West Bank since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 and the ensuing war in Gaza.
More than 690 Palestinians have been killed, the Palestinian health ministry says, as Israeli forces have intensified their nearly daily search and arrest raids. Israel says it is trying to stem Palestinian attacks in the West Bank and Israel, in which at least 33 Israelis have been killed, according to Israeli authorities.
Earlier, an Israeli military official said there was a curfew in Tubas and that the city’s government hospital was surrounded, with people allowed to exit and enter subject to being checked by Israeli forces.
Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that Israeli forces were carrying out large-scale raids on the city’s outskirts and several neighbourhoods.
Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank arrested 30 Palestinians in Hebron, Jenin, Ramallah and Bethlehem, according to the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society.
The raids come days after the largest Israeli operation in the West Bank since last
October.
In a separate development on Wednesday, US President Joe Biden said Israel had to do more to make sure that incidents like the killing of an American-Turkish activist during a protest in the West Bank last week “never happen again”.
The IDF said on Tuesday that it was “highly likely” Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was “hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire which was not aimed at her”. Biden said the US had confidence in the result of the Israeli investigation but described the killing as “totally unacceptable” and demanded full accountability.
