“Fhi a devastating incident that we did not expect to happen. Our Army dropped 17 kilos of explosives, the minimum amount that our combat planes can drop. Our ammunition alone could not have caused that devastating fire,” said Israeli Army spokesman Daniel Hagari, who insisted that the investigation is not yet complete.
The Israeli attack, which took place on Sunday night and whose targets were allegedly two senior Hamas officials, was condemned by most of the international community and classified by Israel as “a tragic accident”, which occurred despite “all precautions taken to avoiding harm to the uninvolved civilian population and using the minimum amount of explosives.”
“It was one of the hardest and most terrible nights since the offensive on Rafah began,” said a displaced person in Tal al-Sultan, quoted by the Spanish news agency EFE.
During the night, Israeli artillery also fired near UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) warehouses in the center of Rafah, killing seven people and wounding 15, according to Palestinian medical sources.
Furthermore, another 13 inhabitants of the Gaza Strip were killed hours later in another bombing, at the doors of the North American field hospital between Rafah and Khan Yunis, in the south of that Palestinian territory that eight months ago was the scene of an Israeli war against the Movement of Islamic Resistance (Hamas), which has been in power there since 2007.
The artillery attacked this and other supposedly safe areas with intensity and without prior warning, from where Israel had not ordered the withdrawal of the civilian population, with the respective tanks having already entered the center of the city of Rafah.
The Government of the Gaza Strip announced that, in the last 48 hours, at least 72 displaced people were killed in Israeli bombings of makeshift tent camps in the western neighborhoods of Rafah, until now considered safe.
“The occupiers have the deliberate intention of continuing to commit more massacres against civilians and displaced people who have fled the horror of murders and attacks, which confirms their insistence on premeditated and deliberate genocide, in a clear message of defiance to international criminal courts,” he declared the Government of Gaza in a statement.
Israel began its military operation in Rafah on May 6 and, since then, more than a million people have fled the city, which until then was home to around 1.4 million displaced people.
The international community called on Israel not to invade the city to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that it was essential to winning the war, as four Hamas battalions remained entrenched there.
At Algeria’s request, the UN Security Council today called an emergency meeting to address the offensive on Rafah, following Sunday’s attack, and Hamas urged the UN executive body to take “immediate measures”.
“The international community and the Security Council must act urgently and forcefully to put an end to these flagrant violations of international law and to protect defenseless civilians,” declared the Palestinian Islamist movement.
On October 7 last year, Israel declared a war in the Gaza Strip to “eradicate” Hamas after it, hours earlier, carried out an attack of unprecedented proportions on Israeli territory, killing more than 1,170 people, most of them civilians.
Classified as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel, Hamas also took 252 hostages, 124 of whom remain in captivity and 37 have died, according to the most recent report from the Israeli Army.
The war, which today entered its 235th day and continues to threaten to spread throughout the entire Middle East region, has so far left more than 36,000 dead in the Gaza Strip, 81,000 injured and around 10,000 missing, presumably buried in the rubble, mostly civilians, according to updated figures from local authorities.
The conflict has also caused nearly two million people to be displaced, plunging the overpopulated and poor Palestinian enclave into a serious humanitarian crisis, with more than 1.1 million people in a “situation of catastrophic hunger” that is claiming victims – “the highest number ever recorded” by the UN in studies on food security in the world.
Read Also: Two more medical centers out of service in Gaza, says Hamas
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Source: https://www.noticiasaominuto.com/mundo/2570206/israel-atribui-incendio-em-rafah-a-explosao-de-municoes-do-hamas
