Story by AFP
GAZA CITY (Palestinian Territories) – The Israeli army said it targeted Hamas militants in a strike on a UN building in Jabalia refugee camp Wednesday that Gaza’s civil defence agency said killed 19 people, nine of them children.
The army said in a statement that it struck the militants “inside a command and control centre that was being used for coordinating terrorist activity”. It separately confirmed to AFP the building housed a UN clinic.
Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said there were also dozens of people wounded in the strike which “targeted an UNRWA building housing a medical clinic”.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said in a statement that the strike hit “two rooms on the first floor of an UNRWA destroyed health centre” which had been used as a shelter for 160 displaced families.
“Many displaced families have not left the site, simply because they have absolutely nowhere else to go,” the statement said.
It added that UNRWA staff “were managing the shelter when it was hit today” at 10 am, and highlighted that the agency had shared the building’s coordinates with the army.
The military said that “the compound was used by Hamas’s Jabalia Battalion to plan terror attacks”, and accused the Palestinian group of “exploiting the civilian population as a human shield”.
The Ramallah-based Palestinian foreign ministry condemned the “massacre at the UNRWA clinic in Jabalia”, calling for “serious international pressure” to halt Israel’s widening offensive.
The Islamic Jihad militant group, a Hamas ally, called the bombing a “blatant war crime”.
Israel has on several occasions conducted strikes on UNRWA buildings housing displaced people in Gaza, where fighting has raged for most of the past 18 months.
A strike on the United Nations-run Al-Jawni school in central Gaza on September 11 drew international outcry after UNRWA said six of its staff were among the 18 people reported killed.
The Israeli military accuses Hamas of hiding in civilian buildings where thousands of Gazans have sought shelter — a charge the Palestinian militant group denies.
Israel resumed major air strikes on the Palestinian territory on March 18, after talks on next steps in a six-week truce broke down.
It conducted air strikes on southern and central Gaza on Wednesday that the civil defence agency said killed at least 15 people, including children, in the city of Khan Yunis and Nuseirat refugee camp.
Since March 18, at least 1,042 people have been killed in Gaza, according to figures last updated by the Hamas-run health ministry on Tuesday.
In total, 50,399 people have been killed since the start of the war triggered by Hamas’s October 2023 attack, according to the ministry’s figures, which the United Nations views as reliable.
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