The Israeli Air Force conducted strikes in a humanitarian area in the southern Gaza Strip, targeting what it said was a militant command center, the Israeli military said on Tuesday. The Civil Defense in Gaza said that the strikes had killed and wounded a large number of people.
The Israeli military said in a statement that its air force had struck at militants who had advanced and carried out terror attacks and were operating from a command and control center in the Khan Younis humanitarian zone. Israel said that it had tried to mitigate the risk to civilians.
A spokesman for the Civil Defense in Gaza said on social media that entire families had disappeared in the strike, along with about 20 tents, and that the attack had left three deep craters, suggesting that more than one missile had hit the area, Al-Mawasi. They said that there had been no warning and that there was a severe shortage of equipment needed for search and rescue efforts.
Al-Mawasi, a once sparsely populated part of southern Gaza, is now packed with tens of thousands of Palestinians drawn by an earlier Israeli military designation of the area as safe for civilians. Israeli airstrikes also hit the area in July, in operations the military said were aimed at Hamas commanders.
Videos and other images emerging from the scene showed people searching in rubble using the lights on their phones, and emergency workers from the Palestine Red Crescent Society digging with shovels near what appeared to be large craters. The videos and images could not be immediately verified.
Earlier reports in Arabic-language news media that several dozen people had been killed could not be independently verified. Videos and images released by the Civil Defense also could not be immediately verified.
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