Israeli airstrikes early on Tuesday slammed into a part of the Gaza Strip that Israel had declared a humanitarian zone, killing at least 19 people and wounding 60, according to Gazan officials, in an area where tens of thousands of Palestinians forced from their homes had sought refuge in tents and makeshift shelters.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the strikes in Al-Mawasi, a coastal area of southern Gaza that was sparsely populated before the war, had targeted three senior Hamas militants who had been involved in the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assault on Israel.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said that the death toll was likely to rise as rescuers dug frantically through debris and sand for people who were reported missing, while ambulances struggled to reach the site. Health officials in Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and combatants when reporting casualties.
On a separate matter, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken rebuked Israel over the fatal shooting last week of an American activist in the occupied West Bank, after the Israeli military acknowledged that one of its soldiers had probably killed her unintentionally. Israeli security forces “need to make some fundamental changes to the way they operate,” Mr. Blinken said.
Videos of the aftermath of the Al-Mawasi bombing, verified by The New York Times, show craters where satellite imagery from a week earlier showed several tents, with furniture, clothes and other belongings strewed across a wide area. People used their bare hands to dig through the sandy soil and move wreckage in search of victims in the predawn darkness, working by the lights of their phones, as emergency workers from the Palestine Red Crescent Society began digging with shovels.
Palestinians sheltering in Al-Mawasi said the strike came without warning around midnight or 1 a.m., with large explosions jolting their tents and filling them with smoke.
“It was like an earthquake,” said Marwan Shaath, a 57-year-old civil servant from the southern Gaza city of Rafah who has been sheltering with his family in Al-Mawasi for more than three months.
Two weapons experts contacted by The Times, Patrick Senft, from the consulting firm Armament Research Services, and Chris Cobb-Smith, a former British Army artillery officer and director of Chiron Resources, said that the dimensions of the craters were broadly consistent with the use of 2,000-pound bombs.
A third expert, Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, identified a fragment found at the scene as “the tail section of a SPICE-2000 kit,” a precision guidance kit that is used with 2,000-pound bombs.
The Israeli military launched strikes in July in Al-Mawasi using 2,000-pound bombs that targeted a top Hamas commander, Mohammed Deif. The military later said that Mr. Deif was killed in that attack.
The United States has previously warned Israel that such powerful bombs can cause excessive civilian casualties and physical destruction in the densely populated Gaza Strip, an area the size of the city of Philadelphia with 2.2 million residents. President Biden suspended exports of U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs to Israel earlier this year.
An official with Civil Defense emergency services in Gaza, Muhammad al-Mughaier, said that 40 bodies were recovered from the site of the strike. The reason for the discrepancy between that figure and the one offered by the Health Ministry was not immediately clear, although official accounts of death tolls often fluctuate in the early hours after an attack.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the numbers from Civil Defense “do not align with the information” it has, but did not offer its own casualty estimate or comment on the figures from the Health Ministry. It said it had carried out a “precise strike” and had tried to mitigate the risk to civilians, though it declined to answer questions from The Times about the specific steps it had taken.
Since the earliest days of the war, the Biden Administration has said the civilian toll exacted on the population in Gaza was too high; in December President Biden described Israel’s actions as “indiscriminate bombing.”
Israel has long said that Hamas and other militant groups embed themselves among civilians to use them as human shields. In its statement on Tuesday, the Israeli military said that it had conducted aerial surveillance in the hours before the Al-Mawasi strike that it said confirmed the presence of militants in the area where it struck.
International law experts have said Israel still has a responsibility to protect civilians during its military operations. Under intensive Israeli bombardment and ground invasion, more than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza in 11 months of war, according to the Gazan Health Ministry.
The Israeli military has repeatedly ordered evacuations of parts of Gaza where fighting and bombing are most intense, and most of the territory’s residents have been displaced multiple times.
Israel has told those who flee to go to areas it designates as humanitarian zones like Al-Mawasi, despite protests from relief groups that the areas often lack adequate shelter, water, food, sanitation or health care. Israel has also shrunk the size of those areas, squeezing Palestinians into ever tighter spaces.
In addition, the zones have not been immune to airstrikes, as Israel insists that it will go after militants wherever it believes them to be. The United Nations and other rights organizations have said there is no safe place in Gaza.
The U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Tor Wennesland, condemned Tuesday’s strike and called for the end of the war. “The killing of civilians must stop, and this horrific war must end,” he said.
Fatoom al-Garra, a 30-year-old widow from Rafah, said she and her children fled for their lives when they heard the explosions from Tuesday’s blast. Israel’s urgings to seek shelter in Al-Mawasi were hollow, she said.
“What safety are they talking about?” she said. “There is no safety.”
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