Dozens of Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli strike on homes sheltering displaced people in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah, according to the head of the local hospital and a reporter there.
“We have received 45 martyrs from the Israeli bombing on the houses of three families in Deir al-Balah in the past hour,” Dr Eyad Al-Jabri, head of the Shuhada Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah told Reuters on Tuesday.
An AP reporter at the hospital counted at least 34 people bodies including at least six children. It was not possible to verify the reports independently.
The AP reported further: Footage from the scene showed women screaming from an upper floor of a house shattered to a concrete shell. In the wreckage below, men pulled the limp body of a child from under a slab next to a burning car. At the nearby hospital, medics tried to resuscitate a young boy and girl, bloodied and unmoving on a stretcher.
In the south, witnesses said an Israeli strike hit a school in Khan Younis where hundreds of displaced people were sheltering on Tuesday, Reuters reported. It wrote: Casualties overwhelmed the nearby Nasser hospital, where wounded men and children were lain on a bloody floor amid a tangle of IV tubes.
In the morgue, a woman draped herself over the stretcher where her dead husband and child lay among at least nine bodies.
“What’s happening here is unimaginable,” said Hamza al-Bursh, who lives near the school. “They strike indiscriminately.”