An official of the Hamas-run health ministry in the Gaza Strip said more than 80 people were killed on Saturday in double Israeli strikes on the Jabalia refugee camp.
“At least 50 people” were killed in an Israeli strike at dawn on the UN-run Al-Fakhura school in the camp, which had been converted into a shelter for displaced Palestinians, the official told AFP.
Social media videos showed bodies covered in blood and dust on the floor of a building, where mattresses had been wedged under school tables.
A separate strike on another building in the camp on Saturday killed 32 people from the same family, 19 of them children, the health ministry official said.
The ministry released a list of 32 members of the Abu Habal family it said had died. Jabalia is the biggest refugee camp in Gaza, where some 1.6 million have been displaced by more than six weeks of fighting between Israel and Hamas.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees was also unable to offer an immediate reaction. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Saturday that only the Palestinian Authority can run Gaza after the Israel-Hamas war is over,
“Hamas cannot be in control of Gaza any longer,” Borrell told the Manama Dialogue, an annual conference on foreign and security policy in Bahrain.
“So who will be in control of Gaza? I think only one could do that — the Palestinian Authority,” he said. Borrell also said: “Count on the European Union as a predictable and reliable partner that remains and will continue [to be] with the Palestinian people in order to get this solved.”
Meanwhile, Hezbollah and Israel traded rocket and missile fire in areas near the Lebanese-Israeli border on Saturday, officials on both sides said, in the latest flare-up of violence which the United States worries will cause conflict to spiral in the Middle East.
Hezbollah said it shot down an Israeli drone near the border in the early hours of Saturday. Israel’s military said it intercepted a missile fired at an Israeli drone.
Lebanese officials said an Israeli air strike hit a building in an industrial area near the town of Nabatieh, one of the deepest Israeli strikes inside Lebanese territory since fighting began last month. The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the incident.
Lawmaker Hani Kobeissy distributed a video online of him visiting the site which he said was an aluminum supply store that had been bombed by Israel.
Hezbollah released a series of statements early on Saturday saying it had hit Israeli military sites and troops in areas along the border and caused casualties.—Agencies
