The Israeli military attacked a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip on Saturday night, killing at least 38 people and injuring nearly 100, Reuters reported citing Palestinian authorities.
The airstrikes hit the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza. It is located in the region where the Israeli military had told Palestinian civilians from northern Gaza to evacuate.
This was the third refugee camp to have been targeted by Israeli airstrikes. The military had struck the Bureij refugee camp on November 2 and the Jabalia refugee camp on November 1.
On Friday, an Israeli air strike on an ambulance convoy in Gaza killed 15 people. The Israeli military confirmed that it struck an ambulance, claiming the vehicle was being used by Hamas militants.
As per the Gaza health ministry data, at least 9,488 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war on the besieged territory, which began after a Hamas incursion into southern Israel on October 7. The attack had killed 1,400 Israelis.
Israel has attracted criticism for its “disproportionate” retaliation from several quarters, including the United Nations.
Despite this, the country has continued to strike Gaza by air, sea, and ground. The Israeli military has said that it is targeting Hamas, a Palestinian militant group. It has accused the group of using civilians as human shields.
Arab nations seek ceasefire
Foreign ministers from Qatar, Saudi, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates met US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Amman on Saturday and urged Washington to persuade Israel to agree to a ceasefire.
“This war is just going to produce more pain for Palestinians, for Israelis, and this is going to push us all again into the abyss of hatred and dehumanisation,” said Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi. “So that needs to stop.”
Blinken, however, refused the idea of a ceasefire, stating that it “would simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on October 7”.
The United States has called for localised pauses in fighting to allow humanitarian aid in the Gaza strip and for people to leave the densely populated area. Blinken said that this arrangement would help protect the civilians “while still enabling Israel to achieve its objective, the defeat of Hamas”, reported the Associated Press.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday rejected the call for a humanitarian pause and told the US official that Tel Avis was “going full steam ahead”.
Meanwhile, senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan told reporters in Beirut that Blinken “should stop the aggression and should not come up with ideas that cannot be implemented”.
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