GAZA  –  Palestinian authorities have said that at least 36 people were killed in an Israeli strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, as Israel continues to conduct devastating attacks across the strip. The Government Media Office in Gaza called last Thursdays attack a “barbaric and heinous massacre”, noting that most of those killed hailed from the al-Sheikh Ali family. “The (Israeli) occupation army knew that this is a residential block with many apartment buildings housing dozens of civilians, children, women and displaced people,” the office said.

Medics told the news agency Reuters that Israeli fire struck a postal office in Nuseirat sheltering displaced Palestinian families, as well as nearby houses. Photographs from the scene show young children coated with dust and blood in the rubble of a collapsed building. In Gaza, it is not uncommon for aerial attacks to kill numerous members of the same family, as Israel’s war continues into a second year. As of October 2024, the one-year anniversary of the war, Israeli strikes had completely wiped out at least 902 entire families in the Strip, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza.

Throughout the war, facilities and buildings sheltering displaced families have been attacked by Israeli forces, who often claim, with little evidence, that they are being used as operation centres for the Palestinian armed group Hamas. Israeli authorities have yet to comment on  last Thursday’s strike in Nuseirat. Health facilities, journalists, and humanitarian workers have also reported being persistently targeted by Israeli forces since the fighting began in October 2023, when Hamas launched a deadly attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,100 people, most of them civilians. In the time since, Israeli attacks have killed more than 44,800 Palestinians in Gaza, more than half of them women and children.

On Thursday, the watchdog group Airwars, which assesses civilian harm from air strikes, released a report stating that Israel’s campaign in Gaza was “by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians” that it had ever recorded. The report found that, during the first month of the war, the number of civilians killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza was nearly four times greater than the death toll of “any conflict Airwars has documented since it was established in 2014”, over a comparable time period. Experts and rights groups also say that the Gaza death toll is likely a vast undercount, with thousands more buried beneath mountains of rubble and the strip’s health services struggling to maintain operations. Last Thursday’s attack on Nuseirat struck a largely residential area in one of Gaza’s eight historic refugee camps, established in 1948 after the forced expulsion of Palestinians from nearby areas, often called the Nakba or “catastrophe”. (Al Jazeera)

Photo: Palestinians mourn the victims of an Israeli strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp in Deir el-Balah. (AP)