Dozens of people from the same family have been killed in the Jabalia refugee camp, the Palestinian foreign minister has said, as Israel continued to bombard the besieged Gaza Strip in the hours after an agreement was reached for a truce that was expected to go into effect on Thursday.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said on a visit to London on Wednesday that 52 members of one family were killed in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.
“Only this morning, from the Qadoura family in Jabalia, 52 people have been wiped out completely, killed,” he said.
“I have the list of the names, 52 of them. They were wiped out completely from grandfather to grandchildren.”
In southern Gaza, media’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said that heavy strikes continued on Wednesday in the lead-up to the humanitarian pause.
“These areas are considered to be ‘safe places’ to flee to from the north,” he said after an Israeli strike left a residential building in Khan Younis “completely destroyed”.
“But they are experiencing the same level of Israeli bombardments.”
Separately in Khan Younis, the bodies of more than 100 Palestinians originally held at the al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, which has been repeatedly raided by Israeli forces, were buried in a mass grave.
The agreement between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian armed group that governs Gaza, comes after nearly seven weeks of war in the besieged territory that has killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands of others.
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