Israeli fire leaves 16 Palestinians dead in Gaza
GAZA CITY : Gaza's civil defence agency said 16 people were killed by Israeli fire today in the Palestinian territory devastated by more than 21 months of war.
Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP the dead included five people killed in an overnight strike on a residential building in the southern Gaza district of Al-Mawasi.
A pregnant woman was among those killed, the Palestinian Red Crescent said, adding its teams saved the woman's foetus by performing a Caesarean section in a field hospital.
Israel designated Al-Mawasi, a coastal area west of the southern city of Khan Younis, as a humanitarian zone in the early months of the war.
Despite that designation, it has continued to be hit by air strikes and now shelters a large share of Gaza's displaced people.
All of Gaza's 2.4 million residents have been displaced at least once since the start of the war, and the United Nations says 88% of the territory is now either under evacuation orders or within Israeli military zones.
The civil defence spokesman said five people were killed in another air strike in Khan Younis' Japanese neighbourhood.
The Israeli military told AFP it was looking into the Al-Mawasi and Khan Younis strikes.
Bassal said six more people were killed in two separate strikes in Gaza City and central Gaza.
Central Gaza's Al-Awda hospital in Nuseirat camp said in a statement that one person was killed and nine wounded when Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians waiting for aid in central Gaza.
The health ministry of Gaza's Hamas-run government said today five people had died of malnutrition in Gaza in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total death toll from malnutrition to 147 since the start of the war.
After talks to extend a six-week ceasefire broke down, Israel imposed a full blockade on Gaza on March 2, allowing nothing in until trucks were again permitted to enter at a trickle in late May.
Stocks accumulated during the ceasefire have depleted, leaving the territory's inhabitants experiencing the worst shortages since the start of the war in October 2023.
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