JERUSALEM – Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip killed 64 Palestinians and wounded more than 100 others on Wednesday, the Hamas-controlled enclave’s health ministry said on Wednesday.
In total, at least 41,020 people have been killed and 94,925 wounded in the besieged Palestinian territory since the war began, following a Hamas attack on Israel that left some 1,200 dead and 251 kidnapped.
Authorities in the enclave estimate that the bodies of some 10,000 missing people remain buried under the rubble of the Strip.
On Wednesday evening, at least 10 more Palestinians were killed and nearly twenty others were injured in a new Israeli army bombardment against the Al Jaouni school in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, which was housing Palestinian evacuees, according to the spokesman for the Civil Defense in the enclave, which continues to search and rescue operations for victims.
According to spokesman Mahmud Basal, the dead include two employees of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), women and children.
Israeli attacks on schools, many of which have become shelters for thousands of displaced Palestinians, have become particularly acute in recent months.
Israel claims that Hamas uses schools in the Gaza Strip as spaces to plan and carry out “terrorist attacks against troops.”
The Gaza government, for its part, denounced that Israel has bombed more than 18 schools or shelters in the Nuseirat refugee camp alone.
Israeli fighter planes also attacked a house on Wednesday in the humanitarian zone of Mawasi in Rafah, south of the Strip, killing four Palestinian citizens and wounding 15 others, according to the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa.
The armed forces designated the coastal area of Mawasi, along with the adjacent points of Khan Yunis in the south and Deir Al Balah in the centre of the Strip, as a protected area, although they have been reducing its perimeter over the months on the premise that the militants use it to attack the troops.
In this area, thousands of Palestinians live in tents without water or electricity. Israeli attacks have already hit these points on several occasions.
On the other hand, this Wednesday the third phase of the vaccination campaign against polio continued, which, so far, has managed to leave 530,000 children from all over the Gaza Strip vaccinated with the first dose.
