At least 93, including 20 children, reported killed in Israeli attack on Gaza building

At least 93 Palestinians were killed and missing and dozens wounded in an Israeli strike on a residential building in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya on Tuesday, the Gaza health ministry said.
Medics said at least 20 children were among the dead.
“A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, and ambulance and civil defence crews cannot reach them,” the territory’s health ministry said in a statement.
Later on Tuesday, Ismail Al-Thawabta, the director of the government media office, put the number of fatalities at 93.
There was no immediate Israeli comment. The Israeli military has frequently questioned figures on death toll published by the Hamas media office, saying they were often exaggerated.
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Video footage obtained by Reuters showed several bodies wrapped in blankets on the ground outside a bombed four-storey building. More bodies and survivors were being retrieved from under the wreckage as neighbours rushed to help with rescue.
“There are tens of martyrs [dead] – tens of displaced people were living in this house. The house was bombed without prior warning. As you can see, martyrs are here and there, with body parts hanging on the walls,” Ismail Ouaida, a witness who was helping to recover bodies, said in the video.
On Monday, the Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said around 100,000 people were marooned in Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun without medical or food supplies. Reuters could not verify the number independently.
The health ministry said on Tuesday those wounded in the strike could not receive care as doctors had been forced to evacuate the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital.
“Critical cases without intervention will succumb to their destiny and die,” the ministry said in a statement.
Gaza’s emergency service said its operations had come to a halt because of the three-week Israeli assault into northern Gaza. Israel says its campaign is to destroy Palestinian militant group Hamas, whose fighters had returned to the area in the year-long war.
Hamas’ October 7th, 2023 attack on Israel killed 1,200 people and more than 250 hostages were captured and taken into Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
The death toll from Israel’s retaliatory air and ground onslaught in Gaza has exceeded 43,000, the Gaza health ministry said.
Gaza’s war has kindled wider conflict in the Middle East, with Israel bombing Lebanon and sending forces into its south to disable Iran-backed Hizbullah, a Hamas ally.
Tuesday’s strike came a day after Israel’s parliament passed a law to ban the United Nations relief agency Unrwa from operating inside the country, alarming some of Israel’s Western allies who fear it will worsen the already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.
Israeli officials cited the involvement of a handful of Unrwa’s thousands of staffers in the October 7th attack and a few staffers’ membership in Hamas and other armed groups.
Unrwa head Philippe Lazzarini described the move as “collective punishment”.
It was unclear yet how the decision will impact the lives of Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip, where the United Nations said most of its 2.3 million people have become internally displaced since the war erupted over a year ago.
Elsewhere on Tuesday, Israeli strikes on Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley overnight killed more than 60 people across a dozen towns, the district governor said on Tuesday, the deadliest day yet in the area in more than a year of hostilities.
Rescue workers were still pulling bodies out of the rubble on Tuesday morning.
Israel has ramped up its air strikes across Lebanon over the last month, saying it is targeting Lebanese armed group Hizbullah. Lebanese officials, rights groups and residents of affected towns say the strikes are indiscriminate.
No evacuation orders were given for any of the towns struck overnight. District governor Bachir Khodor said 67 people had been killed and more than 120 wounded and the death toll was expected to rise.
“That’s only the people who’ve been removed from under the rubble and we still don’t have the final toll. This is the most violent day for Baalbek in the last year,” Mr Khodor told Reuters.
The toll included nine people killed in Ram, its mayor Nazih Noun said, including a woman and her four children.
“It’s quiet now, but we don’t know how we can carry on with the funerals given the security situation,” Noun told Reuters.
Large swathes of the Bekaa Valley are Hizbullah strongholds.
There was no immediate comment from Israel on the attacks.
More than 2,700 people have been killed by Israeli bombardments of Lebanon since Israel’s military and Hizbullah began exchanging fire more than a year ago in parallel to the war in Gaza. At least two-thirds were killed in the last five weeks alone, when Israel stepped up its bombing campaign.
The expanded strikes have targeted the port city of Tyre. On Monday, Israel issued a new evacuation order for swathes of the city and carried out strikes that damaged the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres, which sit within the evacuation zone.
The strikes and detonation of homes have left towns along Lebanon’s border with Israel in ruins, according to satellite imagery. – Reuters