DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Two Israeli airstrikes in the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday killed at least 88 people, including dozens of women and children, Gaza’s Health Ministry said.
Israel escalated its airstrikes and waged a bigger ground operation in northern Gaza in recent weeks, saying it is focused on rooting out Hamas militants who have regrouped after more than a year of war. The intense fighting raised alarm about the worsening humanitarian conditions for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still in northern Gaza.
Concerns about not enough aid reaching Gaza were amplified Monday when Israeli lawmakers passed two laws to cut ties with the main U.N. agency distributing food, water and medicine, and to ban it from Israeli soil. Israel controls access to both Gaza and the occupied West Bank, and it was unclear how the agency known by the acronym UNRWA would continue its work in either place.
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“The humanitarian operation in Gaza, if that is unraveled, that is a disaster within a series of disasters and just doesn’t bear thinking about,” UNRWA spokesperson John Fowler said. He said other U.N. agencies and international organizations distributing aid in Gaza rely on its logistics and thousands of workers.
In Lebanon, the militant group Hezbollah said Tuesday it chose Sheikh Naim Kassem to succeed longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike last month. Hezbollah, which has fired rockets into Israel since the start of the war in Gaza, vowed to continue with Nasrallah’s policies “until victory is achieved.”
A short while later, eight Austrian soldiers serving in the U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon were reported to be lightly injured in a midday missile strike.
UNIFIL said the rocket that struck its headquarters in Lebanon was “likely” fired by Hezbollah, as it came from the north, and that it struck a vehicle workshop.
The Gaza Health Ministry’s emergency service said at least 70 people, more than half of them women and children, were among the dead in the first of Tuesday’s strikes in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya.
A second strike on Beit Lahiya on Tuesday evening killed at least 18 people, the Health Ministry said.
The nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital was overwhelmed by the wave of wounded people, said its director, Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya. Israeli forces raided the medical facility over the weekend, detaining dozens of medics.
