Israel Bombs Blockade-Busting Gaza Aid Convoy, Killing 45

At Least 15 Children Killed As Israeli Airstrikes, Shelling Strike Gaza

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RAFAH, Gaza Strip — At least 45 people, including 15 children, were killed and 150 more wounded late Sunday when Israeli warplanes bombed a makeshift tent camp for displaced Palestinians in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, witnesses and medical officials said.

The Israeli military admitted to striking the refugee camp in a brief statement issued early Monday, more than nine hours after the attack. Witnesses said the airstrike took place at about 7:30 p.m. local time as refugees who had fled fighting in southern Gaza had sought shelter overnight in the schoolyard of a U.N. agency.

Mohammed Abu Hamada, the director of Rafah hospital who personally attended to some of the injured, said doctors were overwhelmed.

“We had a lot of corpses; we had a lot of people who had limbs that were torn apart,” Abu Hamada said by phone from the hospital, where he said 30 new patients were being admitted every hour.

The Israeli military suggested that the tent camp was not filled with fleeing Palestinian civilians, as the U.N. and witnesses said, but instead was a military staging ground. “This was not a civilian installation,” an Israeli military spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, said in a statement.