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Published 03 Dec, 2023 06:44pm

Dozens feared dead in Israeli attack on Jabalia refugee camp

Dozens were feared killed and more buried under the rubble after Israel targetted the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, Al Jazeera reported on Sunday.

Footage from the ground showed devastation in the residential areas and people were seen carrying the dead and wounded away from the attack site, it added.

Last month, more than 80 people were killed in double Israeli strikes on the Jabalia refugee camp.

“At least 50 people” were killed in an Israeli strike at dawn on the UN-run Al-Fakhura school in the camp, which had been converted into a shelter for displaced Palestinians, an official of the health ministry in the Gaza Strip told AFP.

This is the second time the Israeli forces have struck Jabalia, the largest refugee camp in the besieged strip.

According to Al Jazeera, the continuous strikes by the Israeli forces were making it difficult for rescuers to reach the victims of the attack.

Multiple homes were targeted at once while an entire residential block was leveled to the ground with their occupants inside.

The Gaza health ministry said at least 193 Palestinians had been killed since the truce ended on Friday, adding to the more than 15,000 Palestinians killed since the start of the war, Reuters reported.

Israel has sworn to annihilate Hamas following its October 7 attack in southern Israel in which it says 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 taken hostage.

Amid efforts to secure hostage release via indirect talks with Hamas and army operations in the Gaza Strip, Israel has been declaring some of the missing as dead in captivity — a measure designed to grant anxious relatives a measure of closure.

A three-person medical committee has been scrutinising videos from the October 7 Hamas attack for signs of lethal injuries among those abducted, and cross-referencing with the testimony of hostages freed during a week-long Gaza truce that ended on Friday.

That can suffice to determine that a hostage has died, even if no doctor has formally pronounced this over his or her body, said Hagar Mizrahi, a Health Ministry official who heads the panel created in response to a crisis now in its third month.

“Designation of death is never an easy matter, and certainly not in the situation embroiling us,” she told Israel’s Kan radio.

Her committee, she said, addresses “the desire of the families of loved ones abducted to Gaza to know as much as possible”.

Since the truce expired, Israeli authorities have declared six civilians and an army colonel dead in captivity.

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