Gaza health officials said at least 17 Palestinians killed and dozens wounded in an Israeli strike in the Gaza town of Zawayda on Saturday, adding that most of those killed were from the same family, Reuters reported.
The Israeli strike on the town of Zawayda in Central Gaza killed 15 people from one family, among them nine children and four women.
Earlier, Israel issued new evacuation orders citing Hamas rocket fire nearby. On Saturday, Israel’s military spokesman posted instructions in Arabic on X for people in parts of central Gaza to evacuate to a designated humanitarian zone. He said militants were firing rockets from those areas and that the military was preparing to act against them. On Friday, the military also ordered the evacuation of people from two areas of the southern town of Khan Younis as militants regularly fired rockets from there.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the Friday orders affected some 170,000 displaced people, including other areas of the enclave outside the humanitarian zones. The report said the latest evacuation order is one of the largest ever, reducing the size of the so-called humanitarian zone to about 41 square kilometres, or 11 per cent of the Gaza Strip’s total area.
On Saturday, Israeli tanks advanced further into the eastern neighbourhood of Deir al-Balah, an area they had not entered before, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are sheltering, according to eyewitnesses in the central part of the enclave. The Israeli military said its forces have killed dozens of militants since Friday, including some who fired rockets from central and southern Gaza. The IDF also reported it was aware of the reports of the Zawayda strike and was looking into them.
In addition to the incident in the town of Zawayda, the Israeli military struck a Hezbollah weapons storage facility in the area of Nabatieh overnight, killing at least 10 people, a woman and her two children among them. In addition, five injured, two of whom are in critical conditions.
The death toll from the strike is one of the highest in southern Lebanon since Israel launched its war in Gaza following Hamas attacks on 7 October that killed some 1,200 people. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has claimed at least 40,000 lives, most of them women and children.
Amid the continuing offensive of Israeli military action in Gaza and unrelenting cross-border fire between Israel and Hezbollah, hostage and truce talks ended on Friday and are due to resume next week. International mediators presented a new proposal aimed at closing the remaining gaps in the Israel-Gaza divide. Hamas, however, opposes new terms with Israel over the border and hostages.
