Amal Abu Khater, 10, was hit by a bullet in her back while eating in her tent in the central al-Sattar al-Gharbi area of Khan Younis on Monday, according to her family. They rushed the girl to hospital but medics told them on arrival that she had died of her wounds.
“She was eating sweets,” her grandmother, Samira Abu Labda, told Reuters news agency. “Why did she have to die like this? What wrong did this child do?”
In Bureij, Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said its first responders recovered the body of four-year-old Hassan al-Qatrawi from beneath the rubble of his family’s home following an air strike on a neighbouring building. His mother and sister were pulled out alive.
Pictures of the aftermath showed people clambering over a large crater and searching nearby piles of concrete and metal.
The Israeli military said it had ordered residents to evacuate the area before the strike, and that the target was one of five Hamas weapons storage facilities and a launch site that were bombed in central and northern Gaza on Monday.
It alleged that the facilities had been “established inside mosques and alongside humanitarian infrastructure” in violation of international law.
One of the mosques that was struck was in the town of Deir al-Balah, just south of Bureij.
Aerial video footage released by the military appeared to show a large explosion destroying two structures adjoining the main prayer hall.
At the scene on Tuesday, resident Mohammed Abu Amra rejected the claim that the mosque had been used to store weapons.
“They are bombing the book of our Lord,” he said while holding up a damaged Quran.
