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An Israeli strike on Palestinian territory has killed five people including two children, Gaza’s civil defence agency told AFP on Wednesday.
“Five citizens, including two children, killed and others injured, some seriously, as a result of an Israeli missile strike,” in al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis, civil defence spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP.
The agency said the strike hit near the Kuwaiti field hospital in Khan Younis and “targeted” a shelter camp.
The hospital said the five people killed included two children aged eight and 10, and another 32 people were wounded.
The Israeli military said it had struck a “Hamas terrorist” in southern Gaza in response to a clash with Palestinian militants in the area that left five soldiers wounded.
A fragile US-brokered ceasefire that came into effect on 10 October has largely halted the fighting between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, but both sides have accused each other of violating its terms.
The Israeli military said earlier on Wednesday that during an operation in the area of eastern Rafah, soldiers encountered several militants “who emerged from an underground terrorist infrastructure”.
“During the encounter, an [Israeli] combat soldier was severely injured, two additional combat soldiers and a noncommissioned officer were moderately injured,” the military said in a statement.
It added that the soldiers were evacuated to hospital for treatment, and their families had been notified.
The second Israeli army statement announcing the airstrike did not provide details about the fifth injured soldier.
The office of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas of violating the ceasefire agreement.
A security source in Gaza told AFP that at about 4pm local time (2pm GMT), “very heavy artillery shelling took place from occupation vehicles east of Rafah city, along with heavy gunfire from warplanes”. The source said an Israeli helicopter had also landed in the area.
Israel’s military said on Sunday that it had killed more than 40 militants over the past week in operations targeting tunnels near Rafah.
Multiple sources told AFP last week that negotiations were under way regarding the fate of the fighters still in south Gaza’s tunnel network. A prominent Hamas member in Gaza told AFP that the group estimated their number to be 60-80.
Also on Wednesday, UN secretary general António Guterres told Reuters there was something “fundamentally wrong” with how Israel conducted its military operation in the Gaza Strip and there were “strong reasons to believe” war crimes had been committed.
“I think there was something fundamentally wrong in the way this operation was conducted, with total neglect in relation to the deaths of civilians and to the destruction of Gaza,” Guterres said.
“The objective was to destroy Hamas. Gaza is destroyed, but Hamas is not yet destroyed. So there is something fundamentally wrong with the way this is conducted.”
Israel’s mission to the UN in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Guterres’s remarks.
The Gaza war was sparked by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people.
Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza has killed at least 70,117 people, according to figures from the territory’s health ministry that the UN considers reliable.
The health ministry says that since the ceasefire came into effect, 360 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire. Israel’s military has reported three soldiers killed during the same period.
Additional reporting by Reuters
