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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... aid-unrwa/
By Louisa Loveluck, Miriam Berger, Heba Farouk Mahfouz and Victoria Bisset
October 29, 2024 at 4:09 p.m. EDT
Scores of Palestinians were killed and wounded in northern Gaza on Tuesday after an Israeli airstrike hit a residential building where hundreds of people had been sheltering, local rescue and medical workers said.
It appeared to be the deadliest attack on the isolated north since Israeli troops resumed operations against Hamas militants there in early October, and came a day after Israel’s parliament voted to ban operations by the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, Gaza’s leading humanitarian provider.
The Gaza Health Ministry said Tuesday that the latest attack had killed at least 93 people and that 25 of them were children. The Israeli military said it was “aware of reports that civilians were harmed” and was looking into the matter. “We emphasize that the area was evacuated by the IDF and it is currently an active combat zone,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement.
The strike on a five-story apartment block in Beit Lahia was reported at 4:20 a.m., Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for Gaza’s civil defense force, said. Photographs from the scene showed bodies being pulled from the rubble of a building smashed to pieces. Women and children stood over the dead, weeping.