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On Thursday, 15 people were killed when Israeli forces struck a UN shelter in Gaza, medics said, bringing the Palestinian death toll over the past 17 days to 798.
According to emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra, at least 15 people were killed and 200 people were wounded by an Israeli strike on a school looked after by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in the town of Beit Hanun. Civilians have been seeking refuge from the violence at UN-run schools.
Qudra gave no details of the departed, but according to sources in the nearby mortuary, a mother and her one-year-old child were among the dead.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, “Many have been killed — including women and children, as well as U.N. staff”.
Qudra also said that an air strike that landed between the cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah caused the deaths of seven people, and that the “majority of them (were) children” from three families. He named the children as 12-year-old Abedin, 12-year-old Nabeel al-Astal and 13-year-old Ashraf al-Najjar, but gave no further details.
A shelling that landed near a hospital to the east of Gaza City caused the death of an ailing child and wounded 30 others, while an air strike in the city of Khan Yunis caused the deaths of four people, Qudra added. According to his numbers, the death toll for Thursday, at the time of typing, stood at 98 in Gaza, with a total of 798 Palestinians killed and over 5,000 wounded. The figures don’t include over a dozen Palestinian militants who were killed after infiltrating southern Israel.
Among those who were killed in Thursday were seven people who had died by tank fire and air strikes in and around the town of Khuza’a near the city of Khan Yunis. Five of the dead were from the same family while the other two from a different family, Qudra said.
“We have been receiving dozens of appeals from residents of Khuzaa, Abasan and Bani Suheila in Khan Yunis asking us to evacuate them, and saying there were a lot of people killed and injured underneath the rubble of their houses”, Qudra said.
