The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed or wounded 150 civilians, including women and children, in an airstrike on the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza on Thursday.
This massacre is part of a systematic campaign, now 20 days old, to displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who remain in northern Gaza through mass killing, starvation and the total destruction of social services and infrastructure.
The latest massacre, implemented as part of the so-called “General’s Plan” of mass extermination in Gaza, took place as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken continued his tour through the Middle East after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
During his visit to Israel this week, Blinken discussed the state of the genocide with Netanyahu, then issued a blanket statement reiterating the United States’ support for Israel’s war throughout the Middle East.
Describing Thursday’s airstrike, Gaza’s civil defense wrote in a statement that “a horrific massacre is currently happening in Al-Hawaja Street area, Block 7 in Jabalia, with reports of more than 150 martyrs, injured and there is no one to intervene to save them.”
It continued, “Citizens are sending distress calls, pleading for help in transporting the wounded. So far, citizens are facing great difficulty in transporting the martyrs and the injured due to the Israeli occupation’s disruption of Civil Defense and medical services in northern Gaza Strip.”
Journalist Anas Al-Sharif wrote in a post on X, “The Civil Defense in Gaza has announced a horrific massacre in the Al-Hawaja area, in the heart of Jabalia refugee camp, with 150 people killed and injured. There is no presence of civil defense teams, no journalists, no coverage—nothing but death and destruction.
“The dead have been reduced to body parts, and the wounded are left to die without ambulances or hospitals. No one hears them, no one sees them.”
The official death toll of the Gaza genocide stands at 42,847, with over 100,544 wounded. The real death toll is likely to be far higher, with The Lancet estimating it at 186,000 or more in July.
The Wafa news agency reported that “the occupation army continues to blow up and burn homes and residential blocks in Jabalia camp ... to force civilians to flee south. Despite the bombing and war of extermination committed by the occupation in Jabalia and Beit Lahia, many citizens refuse to leave their homes, while the occupation army continues to besiege the displaced, patients, and medical staff in the hospitals of the north.”
The report continued, “Dozens of slain people and wounded are in the streets of the Beit Lahia project and Jabalia camp as the occupation army prevents transferring to the hospitals, which it besieges, and targets the displaced, patients, and medical staff when entering or leaving them.”
Wafa also reported that Israeli forces besieged the Kamal Adwan Hospital in the town of Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, firing directly upon the facility. The hospital houses children in need of urgent care.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, director of the besieged hospital, described the conditions at the hospital to Al Jazeera. “There is a very large number of wounded people, and we lose at least one person every hour because of the lack of medical supplies and medical staff. Our ambulances can’t transfer wounded people. Those who can arrive by themselves at the hospital receive care. But those who don’t just die in the streets.”
The hospital’s director added, “What the occupation forces are committing is deliberate murder.”
On Thursday, an Israeli airstrike on the Shuhadaa al-Nuseirat school in the central part of Gaza killed at least 17 people. A witness, Umm Muhammad, told Al Jazeera, “I hugged my little girl. I couldn’t see anything through the thick plume of smoke. I ran and screamed for my sister and found her alive downstairs,” Umm Muhammad said. “But there were children torn to pieces.”
In a statement Thursday, Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defense forces, said that Israel forces have deliberately “targeted” rescuers, with “several members injured and others left bleeding on the streets with no one able to rescue them.”
Basal said the “the only civil defense vehicle in the northern Gaza Strip governorate” was “targeted by the Israeli army” in the city of Beit Lahia. He continued, “We are unable to provide humanitarian services to citizens in the northern governorate of the Gaza Strip due to threats from Israeli occupation forces, who have threatened to kill and bomb our teams if they remain inside Jabalia camp.”
In a statement issued Thursday, the anti-genocide, US-based Jewish Voice for Peace compared the implementation of Israel’s mass extermination plan in northern Gaza to the Nazi Holocaust. The group wrote, “Many of us have parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents who survived or perished in Nazi death marches, and we have all grown up in the shadow of the Nazi Holocaust. The state of Israel is currently perpetrating a Holocaust, the deliberate mass slaughter of Palestinian people, with weapons provided by the United States.”
The images of ongoing massacres in Gaza “are a terrifying echo of all-too-familiar images of European ghettos and Nazi concentration camps in the 2nd World War,” the group added.
At least 19 people were killed throughout Lebanon due to continual bombardment by Israeli forces, with over a dozen air raids occurring throughout the day on Thursday. The death toll in Lebanon since October 8 has risen to 2,593. The strikes included attacks on towns, including Khadr, Kafr Tabnit, Jwaya, and Qalaouiyeh in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.
Israel’s massacres in Lebanon on Thursday followed the bombardment on Wednesday of the city of Tyre, which wounded at least 16 people. The city is one of the oldest continuously inhabited population centers in the world, and its historic Roman ruins are a UNESCO heritage site.
Meanwhile, Israel issued new evacuation orders in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, declaring, “You are located near facilities and sites belonging to Hezbollah, which the Israeli [military] will be targeting in the near future.”