Gaza Civil Defence Said Israeli Fire Killed 16 Palestinians
Gaza's civil defence agency said 16 people were killed by Israeli fire Monday in the Palestinian territory devastated by more than 21 months of war.
Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP the dead included five people killed in an overnight strike on a residential building in the southern Gaza district of Al-Mawasi.
A pregnant woman was among those killed, the Palestinian Red Crescent said, adding its teams saved the woman's foetus by performing a Caesarean section in a field hospital.
Israel designated Al-Mawasi, a coastal area west of the southern city of Khan Yunis, as a humanitarian zone in the early months of the war.
Despite that designation, it has continued to be hit by air strikes and now shelters a large share of Gaza's displaced people.
All of Gaza's 2.4 million residents have been displaced at least once since the start of the war, and the United Nations says 88 percent of the territory is now either under evacuation orders or within Israeli military zones.
The civil defence spokesman said five people were killed in another air strike in Khan Yunis' Japanese neighbourhood.
The Israeli military told AFP it was looking into the Al-Mawasi and Khan Yunis strikes.
Bassal said six more people were killed in two separate strikes in Gaza City and central Gaza.
Central Gaza's Al-Awda hospital in Nuseirat camp said in a statement that one person was killed and nine were wounded when Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians waiting for aid in central Gaza.
The health ministry of Gaza's Hamas-run government said Monday five people had died of malnutrition in Gaza in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total death count from malnutrition to 147 since the start of the war.
After talks to extend a six-week ceasefire broke down, Israel imposed a full blockade on Gaza on March 2, allowing nothing in until trucks were again permitted to enter at a trickle in late May.
Stocks accumulated during the ceasefire have depleted, leaving the territory's inhabitants experiencing the worst shortages since the start of the war in October 2023.
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