Palestinian woman killed, others injured in Israeli airstrike outside Rafah

By Muhammed Majid

GAZA CITY, Palestine (AA) - A Palestinian woman was killed and other people were injured on Friday in an Israeli airstrike near the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

An Israeli airstrike targeted the courtyard of a house in the Al-Salam neighborhood east of the city, killing the woman and injuring others, a medical source told Anadolu.

The source, who asked not to be named, added that the woman victim and the injured were transferred to Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah without specifying the number of injured or their condition.

Despite the global outcry over the catastrophic situation in the Palestinian enclave, the Israeli premier has stubbornly vowed to attack Rafah, the southernmost town in Gaza and one of the last significant communities spared from a ground invasion in the enclave.

Some 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge there, drawn southward when Israel said the northern Gaza Strip was not safe.

Israel has waged a deadly military offensive on the Gaza Strip since an Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack by Palestinian group Hamas in which some 1,200 people were killed.

More than 34,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have since been killed in Gaza, and over 76,800 others have been injured amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities.

The Israeli war has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.

*Writing by Mohammad Sio in Istanbul