CAIRO: At least 17 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded in an Israeli strike in the Gaza town of Zawayda on Saturday, health officials said, as Israel issued new evacuation orders, citing Hamas rocket fire nearby.
Most of the people killed were from the same family and they included eight children and four women, according to health officials in the Hamas-administered enclave. Israel’s military said it was aware of the reports of the strike and was looking into them.
Israel’s military spokesperson in Arabic posted instructions on X on Saturday for people in parts of central Gaza, including in Maghazi district which is near Zawayda, to evacuate to a designated humanitarian zone. He said militants were firing rockets from those locations and that the military was preparing to act against them. Reuters could not immediately verify whether any areas of Zawayda were among those ordered to evacuate and whether people there received the military’s instructions.
An Israeli strike in southern Lebanon early Saturday killed at least 10 Syrian nationals, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. The strike on Wadi al-Kfour in Nabatieh province is among the deadliest in Lebanon since the Hezbollah militant group and Israeli military started trading strikes on October 8, a day after Hamas attacked southern Israel and sparked the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Friday’s orders, which also included other areas of the enclave outside the humanitarian zones, had affected around 1,70,000 displaced people.
“This is one of the largest evacuation orders affecting the zone to date and it shrinks the size of the so-called ‘humanitarian area’ to about 41 sq km, or 11 per cent of the total area of the Gaza Strip,” an OCHA report said.