Palestinians inspect the damage at a tent camp sheltering displaced people, following an Israeli strike, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Al-Mawasi area, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, on January 2, 2025. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Palestinian officials say an Israeli airstrike has killed 10 people in the Gaza Strip, including three children and two high-ranking officers in the Hamas-run police force.

The strike early on Thursday (January 2, 2025) hit a tent in an Israeli-declared humanitarian zone known as Muwasi, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people are sheltering in tents during the cold and rainy winter.

It killed three children, three women and four men, according to the Nasser Hospital, which received the bodies. Among the dead were Maj Gen Mahmoud Salah, general director of the Gaza police, and his deputy, Brig Gen Hossam Shahwan, according to hospital records. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.

The Hamas-run government in Gaza included tens of thousands of police who maintained a high level of public order before the outbreak of the war.

The police have largely vanished from the streets in many areas after being targeted by Israel, contributing to the breakdown of law and order that has hindered the delivery of desperately needed humanitarian aid.

But residents say plainclothes Hamas security men still patrol much of the territory and the group has faced no significant internal challenge nearly 15 months into the devastating war sparked by its October 7, 2023 attack into Israel.

Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 that day. Around 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, at least a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel’s offensive has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to local health officials, who say women and children make up more than half the fatalities. The officials do not distinguish between civilians and combatants in their tally.

Gaza City:

Surrounded by his grandchildren, Mahmud al-Sarsawi Sunday lay on a table in a corridor hooked up to an oxygen tube in a school-turned-bomb-shelter in the besieged Gaza Strip.

“We all came here to escape the Israeli airstrikes,” said the elderly man from the Shujaiyya neighbourhood, adding he was among about 70 people sheltering in the building for the second day from Israeli air strikes.

“The situation was terrifying, and we had no choice but to seek refuge,” added Sarsawi, 68, who is worried he may run out of oxygen.

He had taken cover in one of 44 schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), which they have opened up as shelters.

More than 20,000 people in the Palestinian territory have been displaced due to fighting, UNWRA says, after Hamas terrorists launched thousands of rockets, and stormed into Israel before dawn on Saturday in a series of devastating attacks on southern Israeli towns.

Retaliation was swift from Israeli forces, who launched air raids on the impoverished and densely-populated Gaza Strip, where 2.3 million people live crammed into a small piece of land.

“I’m telling the people of Gaza: get out of there now, because we’re about to act everywhere with all our force,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned late Saturday, telling people to leave certain areas saying Hamas hideouts in Gaza would be reduced to rubble.

In just two days, about 600 people have been killed in Israel and at least 370 people in Gaza, according to figures from officials on both sides.

“Unbearable”

Inside the classroom, women members of Sarsawi’s family sat on sponge mattresses brought from their home, surrounded by cooking gas, canned food, and jumbled bags of clothes.

Amal Al-Sarsawi, 37, said they were still in shock, after hearing rockets thudding into Gaza. “We gathered what we needed from the house and rushed to the school,” said the mother-of-five.

She says they couldn’t sleep all night, as they tried to calm their frightened children.

“The situation is unbearable psychologically and economically,” she said.

A Hamas government spokesman said 13 towers and residential buildings had been destroyed, with 159 single residential units gone. Another 1,210 apartments were partially damaged.

A UNRWA employee, who asked not to be named, told AFP the New Gaza Boys School, where the Sarsawi family is sheltering, could house at least 300 people — with three families to each classroom.

Children kicked around a deflated football in the school’s courtyard, while women sought to create screens from clothes to have some limited privacy.

Most of the displaced come from the eastern part of Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip.

In one of the hallways, one woman who fled with 14 relatives from the north sat with her head in her hands. Unable to hold back tears, she said they couldn’t afford milk to feed two small babies.

Panic

“We haven’t eaten anything since yesterday morning. We barely escaped from home with some clothes,” she said.

The UN’s World Food Programme said Sunday it was “deeply concerned” about the impact of war on civilians struggling to get essential food supplies.

“While most shops in the affected areas in Palestine currently maintain one month of food stocks, these risk being depleted swiftly as people buy up food in fear of a prolonged conflict,” it said in a statement.

Hundreds lined up Sunday in front of bakers to get bread as the sound of explosions rang out around them.

“I am hosting more than 20 people, relatives, and friends who came from border areas,” said one man holding up five loaves of bread.

Leila Saqr, who lives in one of the areas singled out by the Israeli army, spent the night with her family and three children in the entrance to her building.

“My children were scared. They screamed all night,” she said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)