Gazans say 9 children of doctor couple killed in Israeli strike; IDF looking into report

Gaza’s Hamas-run civil defense agency said Saturday that an Israeli strike in the southern city of Khan Younis had killed nine children of a pair of married doctors, with the Israeli army saying it was looking into the reports.

According to Palestinian media, the strike hit a home in Khan Younis, killing nine children of the same family, all under the age of 12. The father of the family and one of the children, aged 10, were seriously wounded. The mother, Alaa Najjar, a pediatrician at Nasser Hospital, was on duty at the time of the strike.

In response to the reports, the Israel Defense Forces confirmed it carried out a strike in Khan Younis, saying it targeted several suspects identified at a building near where ground troops were operating.

“The Khan Younis area is a dangerous combat zone that the IDF ordered civilians to evacuate for their safety before the start of the operation,” the military said, referring to a warning on Monday.

“The claims about harm to uninvolved [civilians] are being looked into,” it added.

Israel has stepped up its campaign in Gaza in recent days, drawing international criticism as well as calls to allow in more supplies after it partially eased a total blockade on aid imposed on March 2.

Hamas’s civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal said the agency had retrieved “the bodies of nine child martyrs, some of them charred, from the home of Dr Hamdi al-Najjar and his wife, Dr Alaa al-Najjar, all of whom were their children.”

He added that Hamdi al-Najjar and another son, Adam, were also seriously wounded in the strike, and that the family was taken to Nasser Hospital. A medical source at the hospital gave Adam’s age as 10 years old.

Muneer Alboursh, director general of the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, said on X that the strike happened shortly after Hamdi Al-Najjar returned home from driving his wife to work at the same facility.

“This is the reality our medical staff in Gaza endure. Words fall short in describing the pain,” he said, accusing Israel of “wiping out entire families.”

Footage of the aftermath released by the civil defense agency showed rescuers recovering badly burned remains from the damaged home.

Bassal told AFP that Israeli strikes since the early hours had killed at least 15 people across Gaza as of Saturday afternoon. He said the dead included a couple killed with their two young children in a pre-dawn strike on a house in the Amal quarter of Khan Younis.

To the west of the city, at least five people were killed by a drone strike on a crowd of people that had gathered to wait for aid trucks, he alleged.

At Nasser Hospital, tearful mourners gathered Saturday around white-shrouded bodies outside.

“Suddenly, a missile from an F-16 destroyed the entire house, and all of them were civilians — my sister, her husband and their children,” said Wissam Al-Madhoun. “What did this child do to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu?”

In a statement, the military said that over the past day the air force had struck more than 100 targets across the territory, targeting terror operatives and sites. The military says it takes steps to minimize harm to civilians, while adding that terror groups operate from within Gaza’s civilian population.

The IDF said Saturday that all standing army infantry and armored brigades were now deployed to the Strip, as Israel prepared to further intensify its offensive against Hamas.

In addition to the Golani, Paratroopers, Givati, Commando, Kfir, Nahal, 7th, 188th, and 401st brigades, a small number of reserve units are also in the enclave, it said.

The IDF had previously announced that five divisions were operating in Gaza, amounting to tens of thousands of troops.

Israeli officials have warned that as long as Hamas refuses to agree to a hostage deal, the IDF will ramp up its offensive against the terror group.

An Israeli drone strike on Friday killed six Palestinian gunmen who Hamas claimed were guarding aid trucks against looters, as the head of the United Nations warned that only a “teaspoon” of aid was getting in following Israel’s 11-week-long blockade. The IDF said some of the gunmen were Hamas members and a military official denied that they were providing security. “Hamas constantly calls the looters ‘guards’ or protectors’ to mask the fact that they’re disturbing the aid process,” an IDF official told Reuters.

The Israeli military said 83 trucks carrying flour, food, pharmaceutical drugs, and medical equipment entered the Gaza Strip from the Kerem Shalom crossing point on Friday, for a total of 388 since Monday, when the blockade was eased.

However, an umbrella network of Palestinian aid groups provided a separate figure, saying only 119 aid trucks had passed Kerem Shalom into Gaza. The discrepancy was likely because many of the trucks were not picked up by aid groups from the Palestinian side of the crossing for distribution.

Regardless, getting the supplies to people sheltering in tents and other makeshift accommodations has been fitful, and UN officials say at least 500 to 600 trucks of aid are needed every day.

Despite the easing of the blockade, distribution has also been hampered by looting by groups of men, some of them armed, near the city of Khan Younis, an umbrella network representing Palestinian aid groups said.

“They stole food meant for children and families suffering from severe hunger,” the network said in a statement.

Israel imposed the blockade in early March as hostage-ceasefire talks broke down, accusing Hamas of stealing aid meant for civilians.

The UN World Food Program said 15 trucks carrying flour to WFP-supported bakeries had been looted since Monday, which it said reflected the dire conditions facing Gazans.

“Hunger, desperation and anxiety over whether more food aid is coming is contributing to rising insecurity,” it said in a statement.

With most of Gaza’s 2 million population squeezed into an ever-narrowing zone on the coast and in the area around the southern city of Khan Younis by Israel’s military operation, international pressure to get aid in quickly has ratcheted up.

“Without rapid, reliable, safe and sustained aid access, more people will die – and the long-term consequences on the entire population will be profound,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, adding that “Palestinians in Gaza are enduring what may be the cruelest phase of this cruel conflict.”

Guterres pointed to the slow rate of aid entering.

“In any case, all the aid authorized until now amounts to a teaspoon of aid when a flood of assistance is required,” he added in a statement. “Meanwhile, the Israeli military offensive is intensifying with atrocious levels of death and destruction.”

A German government spokesperson said the aid was “far too little, too late, and too slow,” adding that delivery of supplies had to be increased significantly.

Israel has announced that a new system, sponsored by the United States and run by private contractors, will soon begin operations from four distribution centers in the south of Gaza, but many details of how the system will work remain unclear.

The UN has already said it will not work with the new system, which it says will leave aid distribution conditional on Israel’s political and military aims.

Israel says its forces will only provide security for the centers and will not distribute aid themselves.

Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, criticized Israel on Friday, saying that the UN had brought in 500 to 600 trucks per day on average during a six-week ceasefire that broke down in March, about five times higher than current rates.

“No one should be surprised, let alone shocked at scenes of precious aid looted, stolen or ‘lost’,” he wrote on X, adding that “the people of Gaza have been starved” for more than 11 weeks.

Footage published in Arabic media on Friday showed hundreds of Palestinians crowding around a bakery in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp as bread was being distributed for the first time in weeks.

As the aid has begun to trickle in, the IDF has continued the intensified ground and air operation launched last week, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said would end with Israel taking full control of the Gaza Strip.

The war broke out on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping 251.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 53,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.

Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are holding 58 hostages, including 57 of the 251 abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023.