Israeli strike on Gaza post office kills 30 Palestinians

CAIRO -An Israeli strike on a post office sheltering Gaza residents killed at least 30 Palestinians and wounded 50, medics said, and the Israeli military said on Friday it had been targeting a senior Islamic Jihad member.

Families displaced by the 14-month-old conflict had sought refuge in the postal facility in the Nuseirat camp, and the strike late on Thursday brought the day's death toll in the enclave to 66, the medics said.

Israel said its target was an Islamic Jihad leader of attacks on Israeli civilians and troops and accused the militant group of exploiting civilian infrastructure and population as a human shield for its activities.

An Israeli military statement said it was reviewing reports on the number of casualties. It did not identify the Islamic Jihad member by name.

Nuseirat is one of the Gaza Strip’s eight historic camps originally for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war around the establishment of Israel. Today, it is part of a dense urban area crowded with displaced people from throughout the enclave.

Earlier on Thursday, two Israeli strikes in southern Gaza killed 13 Palestinians who Gaza medics and Hamas said were part of a force protecting humanitarian aid trucks. Israel's military said they were Hamas militants trying to hijack the shipment.

Many of those killed in the attacks on Rafah and Khan Younis had links to Hamas, according to sources close to the militant group.

The Israeli military said in a statement the two airstrikes aimed to ensure the safe delivery of humanitarian aid and accused Hamas members of planning to prevent the aid from reaching Gaza civilians who need it.

Armed gangs have repeatedly hijacked aid trucks, and Hamas has formed a task force to confront them. The Hamas-led forces have killed over two dozen members of the gangs in recent months, Hamas sources and medics said.

Hamas said Israeli military strikes have killed at least 700 police tasked with securing aid trucks in Gaza since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023.

Separately, the Israeli military on Thursday ordered residents of several districts in the heart of Gaza City to evacuate, saying it would respond to rockets fired from those areas. At nightfall on Thursday, dozens of families streamed out of the areas heading toward the centre of the city.

Months of ceasefire efforts by Arab mediators, Egypt and Qatar, backed by the United States, have failed to conclude a deal between the two warring sides.

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in Tel Aviv on Thursday he believed a deal on a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release may be close as Israel had signalled it was ready and there were signs of movement from Hamas.

The war in the Palestinian enclave began after Hamas gunmen stormed into Israeli communities, killing around 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages back to Hamas-run Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.

Since then, Israel's military has levelled swathes of Gaza, driving nearly all of its 2.3 million people from their homes, giving rise to deadly hunger and disease and killing more than 44,800 people, according to Palestinian health authorities.

(Reporting and writing by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Howard Goller; Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta; Editing by Angus MacSwan)