At least four Gazans burned to death early Monday when a brutal Israeli airstrike targeted a hospital courtyard in the blockaded Palestinian territory.
The strike sent flames sweeping through a packed tent camp for people displaced by the war, leaving more than two dozen with severe burns, according to Palestinian medics.
After that attack, the Israeli military once again pushed its rhetoric of targeting Hamas members hiding out among civilians, without providing evidence.
In recent months it has repeatedly struck crowded shelters and tent camps, alleging that Hamas was using them as staging grounds for attacks.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah was already struggling to treat a large number of wounded people from an earlier strike on a school-turned-shelter nearby that killed at least 20 people when the early morning airstrike hit and fire engulfed many of the tents.
Footage shot by the Associated Press showed children among the wounded. A man sobbed as he carried a toddler with a bandaged head in his arms. Another small child with a bandaged leg was given a blood transfusion on the floor of the packed hospital.
Hospital records showed that four people were killed and 40 wounded. Twenty-five people were transferred to the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza after suffering severe burns, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Israel is still carrying out near-daily strikes across the Gaza Strip more than a year into the war and has been waging a major ground assault in the north, where it says militants have regrouped.
The war was triggered by the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas incursion of southern Israel that caused 1,200 deaths and abducted around 250 hostages. Around 100 are still being held inside Gaza, a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel's genocidal war since has killed over 42,200 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
Around 90% of Gaza's population of 2.3 million people have been displaced by the war, often multiple times and large areas of the coastal territory have been completely destroyed.
Israel has ordered the entire remaining population of the northern third of Gaza, estimated at around 400,000 people, to evacuate to the south and has not allowed any food to enter the north since the start of the month. Hundreds of thousands of people from the north heeded Israeli evacuation orders at the start of the war and have not been allowed to return.
That has raised fears among Palestinians that Israel intends to implement a plan devised by former generals in which it would order all civilians out of northern Gaza and label anyone remaining there a combatant – a surrender-or-starve strategy that rights groups say would violate international law. The plan has been presented to the Israeli government, but it's unclear whether it has been adopted.
