Tank shelling kills nine at UN shelter in Khan Yunis

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: Tank shelling on a UN shelter on Wednesday killed nine people in Gaza´s main southern city of Khan Yunis, said the Gaza head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

“Two tank rounds hit building that shelters 800 people - reports now nine dead and 75 injured,” Thomas White, UNRWA´s Gaza director, said on X.The head of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, condemned the attack and said the number dead was likely to rise.

“Once again a blatant disregard of basic rules of war,” Lazzarini said on X, adding that the compound had been clearly marked as a UN facility, and its coordinates had been shared with Israeli authorities.

Teams from UNRWA and the World Health Organisation were trying to reach the shelter, which has been blocked for two days, White said.

Earlier he said the UNRWA training centre had been hit, with “buildings ablaze and mass casualties”.

UN officials gave different figures of the number of people sheltering at the facility, with Lazzarini saying 30,000 displaced people had been there.

Footage aired on Al Jazeera Arabic showed fire raging and thick plumes of smoke rising out of the building. Lazzarini said on Tuesday the same shelter had been hit during military operations.

In response, Israel has carried out a relentless military offensive that has killed at least 25,700 people in Gaza, about 70 percent of them women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory. Meanwhile, Washington on Wednesday condemned the deadly shelling of a UN shelter in south Gaza and reiterated calls for civilians to be protected during Israel´s bloody war with Hamas.

“We deplore today´s attack on the UN´s Khan Yunis training centre,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said.

“You´ve heard me say it before, you´ve heard the Secretary say it before, but civilians must be protected and the protected nature of UN facilities must be respected,” Patel told reporters.

Pressed on whether the United States was in contact with Israel about the attack, Patel declined to go into the details of the conversations, but said: “We intend to continue to have these conversations with the Israeli government and raise these very tough and difficult situations.”

“Humanitarian workers must be protected so that they can continue providing civilians with the lifesaving humanitarian assistance that they need,” said Patel.