MONITORING (SW) – Nearly 100 people, including 20 children, have been killed in an Israeli air strike on a single residential block in northern Gaza, the city’s civil defense agency said.
The strike – which the US labelled “horrifying” – hit a five-storey residential building in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza on Tuesday.
93 people have been killed and another 40 people are missing, with rescuers scrambling for survivors, according to the Gaza government media office. 20 children were among the dead, medics said.
“The number of martyrs in the massacre of the Abu Nasr family home in Beit Lahia has risen to 93 martyrs, and about 40 are still missing under the rubble,” Gaza civil defense agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP.
Israel’s military said it was “looking into the reports” of the strike in Beit Lahia.
The bombing comes as Israel faces international backlash after its parliament voted overwhelmingly to ban UNRWA, the main United Nations aid agency working with Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
The US expressed deep concern over the strike.
“This was a horrifying incident with a horrifying result,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled the area, more than 12 months into the war sparked by Hamas militants launching a bloody cross-border assault into Israel on October 7 last year.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 43,061 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable, triggering warnings of a humanitarian catastrophe.
