DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — An Israeli strike on a five-story building where displaced Palestinians were sheltering in the northern Gaza Strip killed at least 34 people early Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024, more than half of them women and children, Gaza’s Health Ministry said.
In a separate development, Lebanon’s militant group Hezbollah said it has chosen Sheikh Naim Kassem as its new top leader following the killing of Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike last month.
The group said in a statement that Hezbollah’s decision-making Shura Council elected Kassem, who had been Nasrallah’s deputy leader for over three decades, as the new secretary-general. Hezbollah vowed to continue with Nasrallah’s policies “until victory is achieved.”
The Gaza Health Ministry’s emergency service said another 20 people were wounded in the strike in the northern town of Beit Lahiya, near the Israeli border.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which has been waging a large-scale operation in northern Gaza for more than three weeks, targeting what it says are pockets of Hamas militants who have regrouped there.
The dead included a mother and her five children, some of them adults, and a second mother with her six children, according to an initial casualty list provided by the emergency service.
Meanwhile, Israeli lawmakers passed two laws on Monday, Oct. 28, that could threaten the work of the main United Nations (UN) agency providing aid to people in Gaza by barring it from operating on Israeli soil, severing ties with it.
The laws, which do not immediately take effect, signal a new low for a long-troubled relationship between Israel and the UN. Israel’s international allies said they were deeply worried about their potential impact on Palestinians as the Gaza war’s humanitarian toll worsens.
Under the first law, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, would be banned from conducting “any activity” or providing any service inside Israel. The second law would sever Israel’s diplomatic ties with the agency.
The laws risk collapsing the already fragile process for distributing aid in Gaza at a moment when Israel is under increased US pressure to ramp up aid. UNRWA’s chief called them “a dangerous precedent.”
Israel has alleged that some of UNRWA’s thousands of staff members participated in the Hamas attacks last year that sparked the war in Gaza. It also has said hundreds of UNRWA staff have militant ties and that it has found Hamas military assets in or under the agency’s facilities.
The agency fired nine employees after an investigation but denied it knowingly aids armed groups and said it acts quickly to purge any suspected militants from its ranks. / AP