Israeli forces kill at least 12 people in Gaza, including six in clinic for refugees

Six people were killed and 15 injured in an Israeli air strike that hit the Al-Rimal clinic for displaced people in Gaza.

ISRAELI FORCES HAVE killed at least 12 people in Gaza today, including six in a clinic housing Palestinians displaced by the war, according to Gaza’s civil defence agency.

Israel has expanded its military operations even further recently in Gaza, where the war has created dire humanitarian conditions for the population of more than two million people.

Civil defence spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP that six people were killed and 15 injured in an Israeli air strike that hit the Al-Rimal clinic, “which houses hundreds of displaced people, in the Al-Rimal neighbourhood west of Gaza City.”

AFP footage showed Palestinians, including groups of young children, combing through the bombed-out interior of the clinic, where mattresses lay alongside wood, metal and concrete broken apart in the blast.

“We were surprised by missiles and explosions inside the building,” eyewitness Salman Qudum told AFP.

“We did not know where to go because of the dust and destruction.”

In the south of the territory, Bassal said two people were killed and 20 others injured by Israeli forces’ gunfire while waiting for aid near a distribution site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) northwest of Rafah.

A US- and Israel-backed group, the GHF took the lead in food distribution in the territory in late May, but its operations have had a chaotic rollout with repeated reports of aid seekers killed near its facilities.

The Red Cross has reported “a sharp surge in mass casualty incidents linked to aid distribution sites” over the past month, which has “overwhelmed Gaza’s shattered healthcare system”.

In a statement, the ICRC said its 60-bed field hospital in Rafah “has been running beyond maximum capacity almost daily.”

“Its staff are racing to treat an unrelenting tide of injuries, the vast majority caused by gunfire,” it said.

The UN human rights office said last week that more than 500 people have been killed waiting to access food from GHF distribution points.

In Khan Younis in the south, Bassal reported two people killed in an air strike on a house and another killed by Israeli gunfire.

An air strike on a house in Gaza City killed one and injured several others, he added.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment.

In a separate statement, it said it had struck “dozens of terrorists, weapons depots, observation posts, military buildings, and other terror infrastructures” over the past 24 hours.