At least four Palestinians taking shelter by a hospital were killed in a strike Israeli officials said was targeting a Hamas command center.
Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip killed Palestinians in a tent encampment on the grounds of a hospital and in a school turned shelter, according to residents and U.N. officials, as deadly fighting also raged between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Survivors of the strike at the hospital complex in central Gaza described flames jumping from tent to tent, shrieks of agony and people fleeing past bodies charred and unrecognizable in the night. At least four people were killed and scores of others, including children, were severely burned, according to a U.N. official, Joyce Msuya.
Many had fled to the hospital in search of refuge from earlier Israeli airstrikes.
“It is like living in a recurring nightmare,” said Mahmoud Wadi, a 20-year-old whose extended family had been living on the hospital grounds for months. “Every time we sleep, we wake up to this same scenario of tents struck, people screaming.”
An Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said that the Israeli Air Force had targeted a Hamas command center in a parking lot adjacent to the hospital and that the fire was “most likely due to secondary explosions.”
The strikes in Gaza came as Israel vowed to retaliate for a Hezbollah drone strike on Sunday that killed four soldiers and wounded dozens of others at a military base in northern Israel. “We will continue to hit Hezbollah mercilessly in all parts of Lebanon — even in Beirut,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement from the military base where the soldiers were killed.
On Monday, the Israeli military struck the village of Aitou in northern Lebanon, killing at least 21 people, according to Lebanese health officials. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
