The Israeli army killed at least 14 Palestinians in Rafah on Wednesday — most of them in a deadly missile strike at a crowd — on the second day of a large-scale offensive in a southern Gaza Strip city, witnesses and medical officials said.
At least 10 people were killed when Israeli helicopters fired missiles at a group of Palestinians who were setting off from the centre of Rafah to the Tel Sultan neighbourhood, to demonstrate against the incursion, officials at Rafah’s al-Najjar hospital said.
Dozens of others were injured, many of them seriously, the hospital said. The Israeli army said it was checking the report. A state of emergency was declared in all Gaza’s hospitals following the strike.
Israeli soldiers earlier shot dead four Palestinians — two teenagers aged 13 and 16 and two armed militants — in ongoing gunbattles in the city. Witnesses said one of the teenagers was killed by Israeli snipers stationed on top of a building in the neighbourhood.
Several neighbourhood residents were injured, they added and Palestinian medical teams were unable to reach the area and evacuate the casualties, because of intensive gunfire.
The deaths brought to at least 34 the number of Palestinians killed in the city since the Israel launched its “Operation Rainbow” on Tuesday morning and took over Rafah’s Tel Sultan neighbourhood. At least 60 people have been injured, 15 of them
seriously.
Some residents said soldiers were calling over megaphones on all men aged 18 to 50 to come out their houses carrying white flags and assemble at a nearby school.
Israel Army Radio had reported earlier in the day that the soldiers were poised to begin their search for wanted militants.
Military officials were quoted by the radio as saying they expected fierce resistance from armed Palestinians in the city.
Israel said it entered Rafah in order to find weapons caches, locate and destroy tunnels used for smuggling arms under the adjacent border with Egypt, and arrest the tunnel operators.
According to a hospital estimate of before the helicopter strike at the crowd, at least 15 of the Palestinian fatalities were civilians.
The army said two of them, a teenage brother and sister, were killed on Tuesday by a bomb planted by militants. However, residents said the bodies were riddled with bullets.
Troops operating in the battered city demolished overnight the house belonging to Ibrahim Ahmad, an Islamic Jihad activist who shot dead a pregnant Israeli woman and her four children in an attack on May 2.
In the northern West Bank, meanwhile, Israeli soldiers who entered the Jenin refugee camp on Wednesday morning shot dead a Palestinian militant in a gunfight, Israeli media reported.
A second militant was shot dead in the nearby city of Nablus, also during a gunfight, the reports said. – Sapa-DPA
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