Israel struck tents outside two major hospitals in the overnight, killing at least two people, including a local reporter, and wounding nine, including six journalists, Palestinian medics said.
Separate strikes killed at least 15 others across the Gaza Strip, according to hospitals.
Israel ended a ceasefire with in March and has cut off all food, fuel and humanitarian aid to Gaza — a tactic that rights groups say is a war crime — while issuing new displacement orders that have forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee Israeli bombardments and ground operations.
Israel's war in Gaza, now in its 18th month, has killed over 50,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza's health ministry.
Israel has vowed to escalate the war until Hamas returns dozens of remaining hostages, disarms and leaves the territory.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on 7 October 2023, killing some 1,200 people, and taking 251 others hostage. The group still holds 59 captives — 24 of whom are believed to be alive.
says it is pressuring Hamas to free its remaining hostages, disarm and leave the territory. Under the ceasefire deal, it had agreed to negotiate for the hostages’ release.
Presumably in alignment with this stated goal, the IDF struck a tent right next to a charity kitchen in Khan Younis where Palestinians — many of them children — had crowded to receive cooked meals. This was but one of a series of attacks in the occupied territory that killed more than 30 people on this day — most of them were women and children, hospital officials said.
Video footage on social media shows bloodied children being carried away from the blast-affected area and into a hospital. Hospital officials told the Associated Press that at least six others had been killed, two of them women, and that 10 people were injured.
It's not the first attack on a community kitchen in starving Gaza that has been laid at the IDF's door.
Days ago, on 3 April, and other watchdog organisations and media amplified an allegation from World Central Kitchen
The heads of six UN agencies operating in Gaza said in a joint statement Monday, 7 April, that the blockade has left Gaza’s population “trapped, bombed and starved again”.
They said Israeli claims that enough supplies entered during the ceasefire “are far from the reality on the ground, and commodities are running extremely low”.
“We are witnessing acts of war in Gaza that show an utter disregard for human life,” they said. “Protect civilians. Facilitate aid. Release hostages. Renew a ceasefire.”
The statement notes that over a 1,000 children have been killed or injured in just a week.
Meanwhile, it says, there has been no aid — and also no commercial supplies — entering Gaza in over a month, resulting in .
Also on Monday, a strike that hit a street in Gaza City killed an emergency room doctor, the Gaza health ministry said noted.
Israel’s campaign against ‘Hamas’ has so far killed more than 1,000 health workers and at least 173 journalists, according to the UN and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
While the Gaza health ministry does not differentiate between civilians and armed personnel and militants, and while popular narrative out of Israel is bent on seeing children pelting stones as 'militants' (or at the least, 'militants-in-training'), at least healthcare workers and journalists don't count as army personnel per international law.
The IDF of course has several times accused healthcare workers of colluding with or shielding or sheltering militants and Hamas leadership. The attack that killed 15 medics recently, with a false narrative of suspicious behaviour laced around it, is one of the recent examples.
Of a piece was the outside , around 2 a.m., which set the media tent ablaze and killed Yousef al-Faqawi, a reporter for Palestine Today, and another person, per hospital officials.
Six other journalists were wounded, among them one Hassan Eslaiah — who the IDF claimed to be targeting because he was a ‘Hamas militant’ who allegedly took part in the .
Eslaiah had occasionally contributed images to the Associated Press, the news agency said , and to several other international media outlets as a freelance journalist. His published images include from from on 7 October. However, the AP reports adds, he had not worked with the AP in any capacity for over a year.
