Agencies
Tel Aviv/Gaza
Several people were killed in Israeli attacks in the northern Gaza Strip on Wednesday, Palestinian media reported.
Four people were killed in the bombing of a house in the city of Beit Lahia, the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported. Residents told dpa that the death toll was higher, saying 10 people were killed in the attack.
According to reports, more people were killed near the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia. WAFA reported five deaths, while the director of the hospital, Hussam Abu Safeia, spoke of six victims.
The Palestinian reports could not initially be independently verified. When asked, the Israeli army said it was checking the accounts.
The Gaza health authority controlled by the militant Hamas movement reported that 47 Palestinians had been killed in fighting during the past 24 hours. Since the beginning of the war more than 13 months ago, over 43,700 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip and more than 103,000 others injured. The figures do not distinguish between civilians and
combatants.
Aid organizations are warning of a famine in the Gaza Strip, particularly in the north of the territory.
Meanwhile, the United Nations’s humanitarian aid chief told a meeting of the Security Council (UNSC) that "acts reminiscent of the gravest international crimes” are being committed in Gaza where Israel’s military continues to bombard, besiege and prevent aid from reaching the civilian population.
Addressing the UNSC on Tuesday, Joyce Msuya, the interim chief of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), described Israel’s monthlong ground offensive and ongoing siege of northern Gaza as an "intensified, extreme, and accelerated version of the horrors of the past year” in the Palestinian territory.