MACABRE: A man tries to pull the body of a child out of the rubble of a house that collapsed after an Israeli missile attack in Gaza City on Tuesday. The child died with 17 other members of the Al-Dayah extended family. (AP)
GAZA CITY: Israeli tanks opened fire yesterday on a school in the Gaza Strip where civilians had taken shelter, killing 43 of them and wounding dozens. Al-Fakhora School in Jabaliya was the third targeted by the Israeli military yesterday. Missile attacks on two other schools killed five more refugees.
On the 11th day of their war on Gaza, Israeli forces entered densely populated cities where Hamas fighters battled them street-by-street. Ezzedin Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said its fighters attacked seven Israeli tanks in Al-Shijiaya, east of Gaza City, and killed 10 soldiers. Israel said it lost five soldiers, four of them in friendly fire. Four Hamas fighters were killed.
Israel’s attack on schools designated as shelters by the UN for civilians fleeing war, raised alarm among humanitarian and rights groups. A senior UN official in Gaza said 350 people had been sheltering at Al-Fakhora School and the United Nations regularly gave the Israeli Army exact geographical coordinates of its facilities to try to keep them safe from attack.
Asked by reporters about the deaths, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said she was “not familiar” with the incident. An Israeli Army spokeswoman said she was looking into information on the incident.
Medics in Gaza said the Israeli offensive has killed at least 660 Palestinians, including 215 children since the offensive began Dec. 27. Another 2,950 people have been wounded.
The Red Cross said that an ambulance post was hit during what it called the most terrifying night of violence yet in Gaza, while the UN reported half-a-dozen Palestinian medical workers dead amid a worsening humanitarian crisis. Israel’s Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) group said that medical teams rescuing the wounded in Gaza were being attacked by Israeli forces. “Testimonies reveal that the army is attacking medical teams that travel to rescue the wounded, including ambulances, doctors and medics in medical uniform,” PHR said in a statement, saying it had reports of 10 such cases.
The group said it had received a phone call from Gaza’s Al-Awda Hospital saying medics were unable to head out to evacuate people wounded in strikes. “We cannot get the ambulances out because we are being fired at.”
Another caller, from the Red Crescent in Gaza, said: “We can’t get ambulances out because as soon as they leave they are fired at from Apaches (assault helicopters).”
Three mobile clinics run by a Danish charitable organization were destroyed by the Israeli Army, an official said in Copenhagen. The Folkekirkens Noedhjaelp (DanChurchAid) clinics were bombarded Monday night despite being clearly marked, said the organization’s secretary-general, Henrik Stubkjaer, in a statement.
Stubkjaer said he was “deeply shocked” by the Israeli military action, which “is aiming directly at humanitarian targets and making all humanitarian work impossible.”
The UN Human Rights Council is expected to convene Friday in Geneva for a special session on the situation in Gaza, a European diplomat said. He said a formal request for the session would be put forward by representatives of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and African and Arab countries.
Under a draft resolution, the council would condemn the Israeli military assault on Gaza and demand that the country halt targeting civilians.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy headed back to Egypt yesterday for more talks with his Egyptian counterpart saying he saw a “glimmer of hope” in achieving a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.
“Time is against us, we must find a solution and that is why I am heading back to Sharm El-Sheikh,” Sarkozy said after visiting French troops serving with the UN force in southern Lebanon.
“If each party waits for the other to make a move there will be tragedies, tragedies and more tragedies,” he warned, referring to Israeli strikes on the three UN-run schools.
A Hamas delegation was in Cairo to discuss an Egyptian-proposed cease-fire. The talks with the Palestinian delegation, headed by Emad Al-Alami and Mohammed Nasr from Hamas’ Syria-based political leadership, represent the first such contact since fighting began.
— With input from agencies
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