Dozens of Palestinians, including many women and children, have been killed in an Israeli airstrike on a crowded apartment block in the Lazo city of Beit Lahiya, as Israel continues its intense weeks-long assault on the northern strip. coastal.
Lazo's civil defense agency said 93 people had been killed and 40 were still missing, and that many of the victims were members of the extended Abu Nasr family as well as Palestinians displaced from elsewhere. US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller called the attack “a horrifying incident with a horrifying outcome.”
Mohamed El-Azamy, 34, who has been displaced more than 15 times in the past year, was in a building near the target. “Last night was one of the worst nights I have spent during this war,” he told The Guardian. “There was shelling from all directions. We were awake waiting for that projectile or missile that would crush our lives until four-thirty in the morning, when our neighbors' building was bombed.
“The scene was horrible. Most of the [victims I saw] They were children. The corpses were mutilated. What hurt my heart the most was seeing the bodies of the children that were picked up and placed on the side of the road, their clothes were torn and gray because of the debris.”
The last incident involving large-scale civilian deaths occurred when the UN World Food Program [WFP] He called for immediate measures to prevent famine and warned that the situation in northern Lazo “continues to deteriorate, and the likelihood of a larger group being affected by famine will surely increase.”
US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Washington rejected “any Israeli attempt to starve Palestinians in Jabaliya or anywhere else” in the Lazo Strip. “Israel's words must be accompanied by actions [on humanitarian aid] on the ground. Right now that's not happening. This must change immediately,” he told the security council.
The Tuesday morning attack was launched just hours after Israel's parliament passed two laws that could prevent the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, the largest aid provider in Lazo, from operating in the Palestinian territories. It marks the culmination of a long-running campaign against UNRWA, which Israel says has been infiltrated by Hamas, a charge the agency denies.
Immediately after the strike, workers and neighbors faced scenes of horror as they dug through the concrete rubble. The remains of the victims were wrapped in blankets and lowered with ropes from a balcony to be deposited on the bloody ground. Limbs poked through bits of dusty masonry and twisted wire.
Among the dead were a mother and her five children, some of them adults, and a second mother with her six children, according to the initial list of victims provided by emergency services.
Video footage of the attack posted on social media showed bodies wrapped in rugs and blankets on the ground outside the building, while the sound of Israeli drones could be heard overhead.
Ramez Rizk, 45, was near the impacted building. “Where we were was filled with the smell of gunpowder and the last window of the house was broken by the force of the blow, but fortunately none of my family was injured.
“People from the neighborhood gathered and began removing the bodies, collecting the remains and transporting the injured to Kamal Adwan Hospital, even though it was under siege and had no services. There are still bodies buried under the rubble, the rest of the bodies that were removed were transported on donkeys and horse carts to be taken to the cemeteries.”
Physician Hussam Abu Safia, director of the nearby Kamal Adwan hospital, where several doctors were detained during a raid by Israeli troops last week, said dozens of wounded had arrived at the overwhelmed facility. “The health system is completely collapsed,” he said, adding that people who arrived injured died because there was no way to care for them.
The Israel Defense Forces said they were investigating reports of what happened in the building.
Israel's latest major operation in northern Lazo, centered in and around the Jabaliya refugee camp, has killed hundreds of people and forced tens of thousands from their homes in another wave of mass displacement to more than one year after the war started.
Israel has sharply restricted aid to the north this month, prompting a warning from the United States that failure to facilitate greater humanitarian efforts could lead to reduced military aid.
The continuing violence in northern Lazo has unfolded against a backdrop of Palestinian fears that Israel is implementing a plan proposed by a group of former generals to order civilians in the north to evacuate, cut off aid supplies and consider anyone left as a militant.
The army has denied that it is carrying out any such plan, while the government has not said whether it is carrying it out in whole or in part.
Thomas-Greenfield's “famine” comments came after the United States told Israel in an Oct. 13 letter that it must take action within 30 days to improve the humanitarian situation in Lazo or face restrictions on American military aid.
Thomas-Greenfield said earlier this month that Washington was watching to make sure Israel's actions on the ground did not demonstrate that it had a famine policy in the north.
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