At least 50 people have been killed in an Israeli airstrike targeting a building in the northern Gaza Strip, the Hamas-controlled health authority said late on Thursday.
Among the victims were five staff members of a nearby clinic in Beit Lahia, including a paediatrician, a laboratory assistant, two paramedics, and a technician, according to the authority and the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, Hussam Abu Safiya.
The information cannot be independently verified. The Israeli military initially did not comment when approached.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military said that one of its soldiers was killed during clashes in the northern Gaza Strip.
Earlier, Palestinian media reported that an Israeli attack in the northern Gaza Strip killed at least nine Palestinians and injured several others.
The report by the WAFA news agency said an airstrike hit homes in Gaza City on Thursday evening.
Hamas-controlled civil defence spoke of at least 13 deaths and around 40 injuries.
The Israeli army said it would investigate the report.
Report: Infants in the Gaza Strip die of hypothermia
Three newborn babies in the Gaza Strip have died from hypothermia, according to a report on Thursday by the Palestinian news agency WAFA.
It said that the babies were between four and 21 days old. Aid organizations have repeatedly issued warnings about the harsh conditions facing displaced families in Gaza during the winter months.
According to UN figures, nearly 1 million people in Gaza lack adequate shelter. A large proportion of the approximately 2 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip have been forced to flee their homes multiple times due to ongoing fighting between Israel and Hamas.
The destruction has left many living in tent camps, where temperatures in Gaza City have recently dropped below 10 degrees Celsius at night.
“If reports about 3 babies freezing to death in Gaza don‘t move us then we don’t understand the birth in a manger in Bethlehem or the light of Hanukkah,” the German ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert, wrote on X.
“They should move us to demand an end of the war and Hamas terror, winter supplies for the Gazans and a full hostage release,” Seibert added.
Israeli strike kills five Palestinian journalists
An Israeli airstrike on a press broadcasting van killed five Palestinian journalists working in Gaza, according to a media report from the area on Thursday.
Broadcaster Al Jazeera, citing a reporter in Gaza, reported that journalists from the Palestinian broadcaster Al-Quds Today were working near a hospital at the refugee camp of Nuseirat in the centre of the sealed-off coastal strip when their marked press van was hit.
Israel’s military said only that it had carried out a “targeted” overnight strike on “a vehicle containing a squad of terrorists from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organization in the Nuseirat area.”
The Israeli statement on X did not mention journalists or casualties, but said that numerous measures were taken to limit the dangers to civilians. Neither the information provided by Al Jazeera nor that of the Israeli military could be independently verified.
Israeli strikes have made Gaza the world’s deadliest place to work as a journalist, with a third of this year’s killings of media workers taking place in the war-torn Palestinian region, according to a December report by Reporters Without Borders.
Prior to this attack, at least 141 journalists had been killed in the Israel-Gaza war since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, according to the US non-profit organization Committee to Protect Journalists.
Hamas militants and other Palestinian extremists crossed into Israel then, attacking Israeli communities and killing more than 1,200 people, while around 250 others were taken hostage to Gaza.
Since then, Israel has been carrying out military strikes on Gaza, with Palestinian figures reporting over 45,300 deaths as a result.
Israeli minister prays at contested Muslim religious site
Meanwhile Israel’s far-right Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has once again stoked condemnation by praying at a contested Jerusalem religious site counter to agreements with the Muslim community.
According to a long-standing agreement with Muslim authorities, Jews are allowed to visit the site known to them as the Temple Mount but to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary but not to pray there. However, there are repeated violations of this agreement.
“I went to our sanctuary to pray there for our soldiers, for the speedy return of all hostages and for total victory with God’s help,” Ben-Gvir wrote in a post on social media platform X on Thursday.
The site houses the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque and is the third holiest site in Islam. It is also sacred to Jews because two Jewish temples once stood there.
The site in the Old City of Jerusalem is under Muslim administration while Israel is responsible for security.
As after last provocations by Ben-Gvir, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the status quo on the Temple Mount had not changed. However, the national security minister’s violations of the rules never have any consequences.
A Palestinian man carries the dead body of a child killed in an Israeli strike on a school, outside the Al-Ahli Arab hospital, also known as the Baptist hospital, in Gaza City. Hadi Daoud/APA Images via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa