TNA Staff
The New Arab / April 12, 2025
A UN human rights office report also warned that expanding Israeli displacement orders were resulting in the ‘forcible transfer’ of people.
Dozens of Israeli air strikes on Gaza have killed “only women and children” after a ceasefire collapsed last month, the United Nations said, as an Israeli attack in the territory’s south killed a family of 10 on Friday.
A UN human rights office report also warned that expanding Israeli displacement orders were resulting in the “forcible transfer” of people into ever-shrinking areas, raising “real concern as to the future viability of Palestinians as a group in Gaza”.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the attack that killed members of the same family in Khan Younis, claiming separately that it hit around 40 “terror targets” across the territory over the previous day.
Israel resumed its Gaza strikes on 18 March, ending a two-month ceasefire with Hamas.
Since then, Israeli strikes have killed more than 1,500 Palestinians, according to the health ministry in Gaza.
“Ten people, including seven children, were brought to the hospital as martyrs following an Israeli air strike that targeted the Farra family home in central Khan Younis,” civil defence spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP.
AFP footage of the aftermath showed several bodies wrapped in white shrouds and blankets, and the mangled concrete slabs and twisted metal of the family’s home.
Late on Friday, the civil defence reported that at least four more people were killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza, while the military said it shot dead “two terrorists” who fired at troops in southern Gaza.
The military also reported it intercepted a drone approaching from the east, but did not give details of where it had been launched from.
Since the war in Gaza erupted, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have repeatedly launched drones and missiles at Israel in what they say is solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Living in cemeteries
Reacting to Friday’s strike on the family home, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced Israel at a forum, saying: “If this is not barbarism, I ask you, what is it?”
Israel’s military issued new displacement orders to residents in areas of northern and southern Gaza ahead of new offensives.
“Several medical facilities and storage sites containing critical supplies are located within the newly designated displacement zones,” the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
OCHA warned that this could have “life-threatening consequences for people in urgent need of care”.
Many displaced Gazans are living in tents in cemeteries.
“We couldn’t find any place to live … That’s why we were forced to sit on top of graves,” Ibtisam Abu Ghanima told AFP at a cemetery in Gaza City.
“The dead have become better off than the living. On top of that, there’s the awful smell, rats come at us, reptiles too, and we are dying,” she said.
The UN decried the impact of Israel’s ongoing strikes, finding that “a large percentage of fatalities are children and women”.
“Between 18 March and 9 April 2025, there were some 224 incidents of Israeli strikes on residential buildings and tents for internally displaced people,” the UN human rights office said in Geneva.
“In some 36 strikes about which the UN Human Rights Office corroborated information, the fatalities recorded so far were only women and children.”
