Israel assaulted southern Gaza’s main city in what it said was the fiercest combat since it began its ground invasion to eliminate Hamas five weeks ago.
The death toll surged to at least 16,248 people including 7,112 children and 4,885 women, according to Hamas media office. Thousands more are missing and feared buried under rubble.
Israel reported its forces, backed by warplanes, on Tuesday reached the heart of Khan Younis in southern Gaza and also surrounded the city. Hamas’ armed wing, the al Qassam Brigades, said that its fighters engaged in clashes with Israelis.
“We are in the most intense day since the beginning of the ground operation,” the commander of the Israeli military’s Southern Command, General Yaron Finkelman, said in a statement.
They were also the most pitched battles since a truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed last week. Israeli forces also fought in Jabalia, a large urban refugee camp in northern Gaza next to Gaza City, and in Shuja’iyya, east of the city, Finkelman said.
Hamas’ armed wing said that it killed or wounded eight Israeli troops and destroyed 24 military vehicles on Tuesday. An Israeli military website listed two troop deaths for Tuesday and 83 since the ground operation began.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry reported that at least 25 Palestinian refugees were killed in Tuesday’s Israeli strike on a school.
Witnesses said dozens of injured people, as well as bodies recovered from under the rubble of Ma’an school in Khan Yunis had been taken to the city’s Nasser hospital.
Khan Yunis, Gaza’s second-largest city, has been targeted for several days by intense bombing by the Israeli army, which has now also sent ground troops to the area in its war on Hamas.
Mohammed Salou, whose sister was killed in Tuesday’s strike, told AFP: “My cousin called me and told me to come because my sister’s body was lying in a schoolyard, and we couldn’t retrieve it.”
He eventually managed to take the body to a hospital, he said.
Salou said he believed “it was not the school itself which was targeted, but rather the area around it”.
Many Palestinians have found refuge in schools or hospitals since the start of the Israeli offensive in October, believing they were relatively safe from attacks.
Numerous schools and hospitals or their direct surroundings have been struck in the Gaza Strip since the war began.
“We took refuge in the school and they continued to target us,” said Etraa al-Jerjawi, a woman who had left her home for fear of violence and lost a relative in the strike on Ma’an school.
