Israeli strikes on Gaza have killed at least 61 Palestinians since dawn on Thursday, medical sources told Al Jazeera, amid Israel’s starvation blockade on the territory that has blocked food and aid shipments for more than two months.
According to Reuters, Israeli strikes that hit a restaurant and market in Gaza City killed at least 33 people, including women and children. “People come to the market to get what they need if they can find it … Neither the people nor the animals were safe. Neither the young nor the old,” Ahmed al-Saoudi, who witnessed the Israeli attack, told Reuters.
Hani Mahmoud, a reporter for Al Jazeera, said the Israeli strike targeted one of the few places where Palestinians could find a meal in the area. Drop Site News reported that the restaurant was the last one open in Gaza City.
According to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), among the victims was Yahya Subeih, a journalist who was killed hours after the birth of his daughter.
The other major Israeli attack in Gaza City hit a school-turned-shelter for displaced Palestinians in the Tuffah suburb, killing at least 15. The PJS said another journalist was killed in that strike, Nour al-Din Abdo.
The PJS said the attack has brought the total number of journalists killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023, to 212. According to WAFA, the PJS described the “upsurge in the number of slain journalists as deliberate targeting that amounts to a war crime under international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions.”
A day earlier, two separate Israeli attacks hit another school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Bureij central Gaza, killing 32 people, including at least nine children and four women. Haaretz reported that a nearby mosque was told to evacuate, but not the school. The Israeli strikes hit the school after Palestinians who were near the mosque went there to take shelter.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Wednesday that since Israel resumed its genocidal war on March 18, at least 2,545 Palestinians have been killed, and 6,856 were injured. The numbers account for dead and wounded Palestinians brought to hospitals and morgues.
Since October 7, 2023, the ministry’s death toll has reached 52,653, and the number of wounded has climbed to 118,897, figures that don’t account for thousands missing and presumed dead under the rubble or indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege.
