At least 28 Gazans said killed in wave of strikes as IDF responds to truce violation |
At least 32 Palestinians, including women, children and Hamas police officers, were reported killed in a wave of airstrikes across the Gaza Strip overnight and into Saturday morning — one of the highest death tolls since the October ceasefire — as the Israeli military confirmed it targeted terror commanders and infrastructure in response to what it called a “violation of the ceasefire agreement.”
The Israel Defense Forces said its strikes targeted four commanders in the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror groups, as well as a weapons depot, an arms manufacturing site and two rocket launching positions.
“The terror organizations in the Strip systematically violate international law, while brutally exploiting civilian institutions and operating in the presence of the local population,” the military said in a statement.
Hamas’s civil defense agency said it had retrieved the bodies of 32 people killed in seven different locations since Saturday morning. Hamas authorities claimed that around a quarter of those killed were children, about a third were women, one was an elderly man and five were officers in the Hamas-run police force.
The Hamas-run health ministry reported another 30 people wounded, some in critical condition.
The tolls could not be independently verified, and Israel did not release its own casualty figures.
Among the reported strikes was an attack on the Sheikh Radwan police station in Gaza City, which Hamas’s interior........