AN ISRAELI strike on a five-storey building where displaced Palestinians were sheltering in the northern Gaza Strip killed at least 60 people early on Tuesday, 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. Israel also faced backlash from aid groups after its Parliament passed legislation that could severely restrict the ability of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees to operate in the Palestinian territories. Strike in northern Gaza comes as Israel wages a major operation there. Even as attention has shifted to Lebanon and Iran in recent weeks, Israel has continued to wage a large operation in northern Gaza and to carry out airstrikes across the territory. Dr. Marwan al-Hams, director of the field hospitals’ department at the Gaza Health Ministry, announced the toll from Tuesday’s strike in the northern town of Beit Lahiya at a news conference. He said another 17 people are missing. The Ministry’s emergency service said at least 12 women and 20 children were among the dead, including babies.

 

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which has been waging the 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. The Israeli military has repeatedly struck shelters for displaced people in recent months, saying it carried out precise strikes targeting Palestinian militants and tried to avoid harming civilians. The strikes have often killed women and children.

 

The military said it detained scores of Hamas militants in the raid on Kamal Adwan, the latest in a series of raids on hospitals since the start of the war. Israel’s latest major operation in northern Gaza, focused on the Jabaliya refugee camp, has killed hundreds of people and driven tens of thousands from their homes in another wave of mass displacement more than a year into the war in the tiny coastal territory. Israeli laws targeting UN agency could further restrict aid. Palestinians fear Israel is enacting a plan proposed by a group of former generals, who suggested the civilian population of the north should be ordered to evacuate, aid supplies should be cut off, and anyone remaining there should be considered a militant. The military has denied carrying out such a plan while the Government has not said clearly whether it is carrying out all or part of it.