By South China Morning Post | Created at 2024-10-06 05:33:05 | Updated at 2024-10-06 08:30:29
3 hours ago
At least 24 people were killed and dozens of others wounded in an Israeli air strike on a Gaza mosque early on Sunday, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
The strike on the mosque, near the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, came as Israel’s war in the Palestinian enclave approaches its first anniversary.
Eyewitnesses said the number of casualties could rise as the mosque was being used to house displaced people.
The Israeli military said in a statement it “conducted a precise strike on Hamas terrorists who were operating within a command and control centre embedded in a structure that previously served as the ‘Shuhada al-Aqsa’ Mosque in the area of Deir al-Balah.”
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered when Palestinian Hamas militants attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people, many of them civilians, and taking about 250 as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent military assault on Gaza has killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry. It has also displaced almost all of the enclave’s 2.3 million people, caused a hunger crisis, and led to genocide allegations at the World Court that Israel denies.
