Oct. 29 (UPI) — Israeli strikes killed at least 115 people across Gaza on Tuesday morning, more than 100 of them in an airstrike on a residential building in the north, according to officials from the Hamas-run local government.
The officials said that with 40 people unaccounted for and dozens injured, they expected the death toll to rise.
The early morning strike hit a five-story building in Beit Lahia, about 2 1/2 miles northeast of Jabalia. About 200 people were living in the building, and at least 109 died, the Gaza government media office told NBC News. About 20 children are among the dead.
Al Jazeera reported another six people killed in Israeli strikes elsewhere, but did not say where.
The Kamal Adwan Hospital, barely a mile away, was unable to help the injured, as it had no doctors or drugs, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, adding that “critical cases without intervention will succumb to their destiny and die.”
The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the incident, but Israel Defense Forces are two weeks into an operation in a small area bounded by Jabalia, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun to clear the district of Hamas fighters who it says have regrouped in the five months since Israeli forces withdrew in May.
In a statement Tuesday, the IDF claimed it had killed 40 “terrorists” in nearby Jabalia and “eliminated” many further to the south in central Gaza in the past day
Tuesday’s strike, the deadliest in several months, came hours after the Knesset lawmakers in Jerusalem voted to ban the United Nations’ agency for Palestinian refugees from operating in Israel severely limiting, if not completely blocking, its ability to bring in desperately needed supplies of food and medicine for its operations in Gaza, which include schools.
The ban also bars the agency from any contact with Israeli authorities when it comes into force in three months’ time meaning its officials and workers will no longer be able to coordinate their movements within Gaza with the Israeli military, seen as vital to avoid becoming inadvertent targets.
Members of Parliament agreed it fomented “terrorism and hatred” and was an “agency for perpetuating poverty and suffering” engaged in creating demand for the product it provided in order to survive.
UNICEF warned the ban could cause the humanitarian system in Gaza to collapse with spokesman James Elder condemning the move as a “new way to kill children.”
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the Palestinian refugee agency was vital and nothing at this time could fill the gap the ban would create.
Office spokesman Jens Laerke said the move, if implemented, would represent yet another “form of “collective punishment” to those acts with which people in Gaza had already been hit.
But the move drew widespread international criticism from the United States, which warned of “implications under U.S. law and U.S. policy,” the European Union, France, Britain, Norway, Slovenian, Spain, Australia and others, while U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres vowed to bring the matter before the General Assembly.
U.N. Works and Refugee Agency chief Philippe Lazzarini said the ban was a violation of international law that would deepen the suffering of Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, who “have been going through more than a year of sheer hell.”
The number of people killed in Gaza since the October 7, 2023, attacks stood at 43,061 as of the end of Monday, with 101,223 injured, according to figures posted on the social media page of the Hamas-run Palestinian Ministry of Health.
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