DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli strikes on residential areas in southern Gaza killed 38 people Friday, including 13 children from the same extended family, Palestinian health officials said.
In northern Gaza, health officials reported that Israeli forces had raided Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of the few medical facilities still functioning in the area. Israel has renewed its offensive against Hamas in the north in recent weeks, and aid groups are sounding the alarm over dire humanitarian conditions.
In Lebanon, Israeli strikes on the country’s southeast killed three journalists working for news outlets that are considered to be aligned with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and its patron, Iran.
The Israeli military, which has said that troops are targeting Hamas fighters in the southern city of Khan Younis, did not respond to questions about Friday’s attack on several residential buildings. Palestinians said the neighborhood was hit with no warning.
Footage from the Palestinian Civil Defense showed rescuers pulling the bloodied bodies of nine children from the al-Farra family out of the ruins.
The victims were taken to the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis as well as to the European Hospital, where records showed at least 15 members of the al-Farra family had been killed. Six members of the Abdeen family were also killed, health officials reported.
Saleh al-Farra, who lost his 17-year-old brother and 15-year-old sister in the attack, said the shaking from the bombardment sent his family members running to the middle of the house for shelter. The next thing he knew, he said, he was waking up in the rubble of what had been his home.
“I started screaming and screaming until my brother and father came, and they started trying to pull me out,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about anyone.”
The medical organization Doctors Without Borders said one of its staff members had been killed in the Israeli attack on Khan Younis. It said Hassan Sobh, 41, a father of seven, was its eighth worker to be killed in the past year of the Israel-Hamas war.
“Israel continues to show blatant disregard for civilian lives in its war on Gaza,” the organization said in its news release.
In response to reports that it had stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, the Israeli military said only that it was “operating in the area” of the hospital based on intelligence that indicated the presence of militants and militant infrastructure.
The pediatric hospital is one of the area’s three medical facilities to remain somewhat operational after more than a year of war. Since Israeli military ordered the evacuation of the hospitals amid its renewed assault against Hamas militants in northern Gaza, doctors have warned that dire shortages of food, medicine and other supplies had triggered a humanitarian emergency.
The Gaza-based Ministry of Health reported that Israeli troops rounded up medical staff and displaced people sheltering at the hospital Friday and forced the men to strip, a common practice that Israel says is meant to ensure that detainees do not conceal weapons. The ministry said some Palestinians were detained, without specifying how many.
The Palestinian Civil Defense said Israeli forces arrested two of its workers, including a local rescue coordinator and a firefighter. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the arrests.
Meanwhile, an Israeli airstrike killed three journalists as they slept at a guesthouse in southeast Lebanon at dawn Friday, one of the deadliest attacks on the media since hostilities broke out across the border a year ago.
It was a rare airstrike on an area that had been spared airstrikes and has been used by the media as a base for covering the war. The 3 a.m. airstrike turned the site — a series of chalets nestled among trees that had been rented by various media outlets covering the war — into rubble, with cars marked “PRESS” overturned and covered in dust and debris and at least one satellite dish for broadcasting destroyed. The Israeli army did not issue a warning prior to the strike, saying later that it is looking into it.
The airstrike was the latest in a series of Israeli attacks against journalists covering the war in Gaza and Lebanon in the past year. Israel has not commented on what its target was in the attack. But human rights groups say deliberately targeting journalists is a war crime.
“Journalists are civilians that are entitled to protection under international humanitarian law,” said Aya Majzoub, Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa.