Israeli air and tank strikes hit crowded camps, kill six Palestinians in Gaza
- Last updated: March 9, 2026 | 18:05 ..
An Israeli airstrike and tank shelling killed six Palestinians, including two women and a girl, in separate attacks in Gaza City, the deadliest incidents in Gaza since the US-Israeli assault on Iran began a week ago, health officials said.
Mohamed Abu Selmia, the head of the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, said three men were killed in an airstrike near Al Azhar University in western Gaza City - a paramedic Mohammad Hamduna, and two others named as Mohammad Abu Shedeq and Ahmed Lafi.
The strike hit near crowded tent camps where Gazans were sheltering, and wounded several other people, the medics added.
Such attacks have declined since the start of the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, although Israeli forces have killed several Palestinians over the past week.
A little after midnight in the central Gaza Strip, Israeli tank shelling killed at least three people, two women, including a local journalist, and a girl, and wounded 10 other people, some of them children, according to health officials at Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat camp.
Medics said the tank shells hit a tent encampment, housing displaced families in the western Nuseirat area. Two years of war turned most of the enclave into a wasteland, and uprooted most of the territory's population of over two million.
On Monday, an Israeli security official told Reuters the military wasn't aware of any incident in which a child and a journalist were killed by Israeli shelling.
BLANKETS STAINED WITH BLOOD
Reuters footage showed Palestinians sifting through the tent encampments, checking damage to their shelters, and displaying blankets stained with blood, as some women sat and wept next to a white-shrouded body.
"We were sitting in our tents, sitting, and suddenly we saw something striking like red fire once, twice, and three times. We started running without knowing (where to go)," said Nisreen Abu Shalouf, whose daughter-in-law was killed in the strike.
"I found my daughter-in-law in the tent, I found her with her brain exposed...She was still a newlywed, I swear, she was a newlywed,” she told Reuters. Some of her children were also wounded.
The Gaza health ministry said at least 640 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since October. Israel says four soldiers have been killed by militants in Gaza over the same period.
Gaza has been devastated by more than two years of an Israeli onslaught that killed over 72,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities.
Reuters