At least 45 people, including several women and a week-old infant, have been killed in tonight's Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, according to hospital sources and the civil defense in the Hamas-controlled area.
Our personnel transported 19 dead, most of them children, and dozens injured, said civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal early in the morning.
According to Bassal, several parts of Gaza have been attacked.
Aid on its way
The reports come as the humanitarian situation in Gaza is becoming increasingly acute. After Israel announced that it would allow a "minimal" amount of aid to the civilian population, following an 11-week-long blockade, a number of trucks have entered through the Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza.
But the aid in the trucks that drove into the area on Tuesday has not yet been able to be distributed to the population, according to the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, according to BBC.
And on Wednesday, extremists said to have ties to settler groups on the West Bank are trying to physically stop trucks, reports among others the newspaper Haaretzetz.
It is about activists from the group Tsav 9, which is subject to American sanctions and which the State Department in Washington DC designates as a "violent extremist group".
"Ridiculously insufficient"
Pascale Coissard, Médecins Sans Frontières' emergency coordinator in Khan Yunis, calls the extremely limited amount of aid that is now being delivered a "smokescreen to pretend that the blockade is over".
Israel's decision to allow a ridiculously insufficient amount of aid to Gaza after months of a strict blockade signals the intention to avoid being accused of starving people in Gaza, he says.
The ongoing Gaza war broke out after the terrorist-stamped Hamas, which rules in Gaza, attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
On Sunday, Israel launched a new "comprehensive" offensive in Gaza aimed at defeating Hamas. On Wednesday, it is reported that two hospitals in northern Gaza, considered some of the area's last functioning, have been encircled by Israeli soldiers. The soldiers are said to be preventing people from entering or leaving the Indonesian hospital and the al-Awda hospital, according to AP.
Israel ordered the evacuation of large parts of northern Gaza on Friday, including areas where the hospitals are situated.
