Israeli fire kills three in Gaza Strip

Israeli fire kills three in Gaza Strip

GAZA CITY/BIDDU: Gaza health officials said Israeli fire killed three people, including a woman and a child, and injured several others across the Pales­t­­i­­nian territory on Monday. Officials at Nasser hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis said the body of a child, Ismail Al-Bardawil, was brought to the medical facility after Israeli tanks opened fire on tents for displaced people in the Al-Mawasi area. Mahmoud Bassal, the spokesman for Gaza’s civil defence agency, which operates as a rescue force under Hamas authority, said the child was 11 years old. In the central Gaza Strip, Al-Awda hospital officials said 31-year-old Fidaa Toutah died from her wounds after being shot by Israeli forces on Salah al-Din street east of Nuseirat refugee camp. Officials at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City said a man, Mohsen Ahmed Bahjat, died after being shot in the head by a drone in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip. Gaza’s civil defence agency confirmed the identities of the dead. It said its teams had transported nine wounded people to hospitals following Israeli fire in Khan Yunis in the south and Bureij refugee camp in the centre of the territory. When contacted, the Israeli military said it was checking the reports. Israel in October last year agreed to a ceasefire brokered by the United States but since then has advanced further into Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed no let-up in strikes targeting Hamas. Israeli strikes have killed more than 1,300 people since the ceasefire was announced last year, according to the Gaza health ministry, whose figures are considered generally reliable by the United Nations. West Bank raids Israeli forces on Monday rai­ded the hometown of a Pales­­tinian man suspected of shooting dead an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank the day before, local authorities said. Sunday’s shooting occurred near the Israeli settlement of Neveh Tzuf, north of Ramallah, on the eve of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, with the suspected assailant apprehended by soldiers after being located at a hospital. Israel’s military said that its troops had raided the home of the attacker’s family in the Palestinian village of Biddu, northwest of Jerusalem in the West Bank. The Jerusalem Governorate, the Palestinian local authority for the area, said Israeli forces then raided Biddu at dawn on Monday and “carried out a large-scale arrest campaign targeting dozens of young men”. “The raid was accompanied by searches, vandalism, and the smashing of property inside a number of homes, as well as physical assaults on several residents,” it said, adding that the raid was ongoing. A photographer saw Israeli forces in the town on Monday. Biddu’s mayor, Nazmi Mansour, said that the military had stormed the town after midnight with “dozens of military jeeps and hundreds of soldiers”. “The soldiers began house-to-house searches and set up field interrogation centres in buildings they had taken control of,” he said, adding that dozens of people were questioned. Published in Dawn, September 22nd, 2026