At least 20 people have died and many others were injured tonight in the Gaza Strip after a residential building caught fire, Palestinian government and medical sources reported.
The building, located in the Jabalia refugee camp, in the north of the Strip, would have accidentally caught fire and the flames would have spread at high speed because the building housed large amounts of benzene, a highly flammable chemical.
Salah Abu Laila, director of the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza, told EFE that 21 people died in the fire, including seven children.
In addition, he specified that more than 30 people were injured, some of them seriously and including emergency services personnel who went to the site.
A statement from the Gazan Ministry of the Interior detailed that the Police and forensic teams are on site to investigate the causes of the fire, which has already been controlled by firefighters.
Local witnesses and Palestinian sources from the Strip told EFE that the residence where the fire broke out belongs to the Abu Rayah family, which was celebrating the return of one of its members from Egypt.
Images broadcast in local media and social networks showed how huge and violent flames burned an apartment on the top floor of the building, while dozens of people gathered in the surroundings to try to help the medical teams.
This is the bloodiest fire in years in the impoverished Gaza Strip, where more than two million people live crammed into a territory of less than 400 square kilometers.
The Palestinian National Authority (PNA), which rules parts of the occupied West Bank, announced that it would make its hospitals and medical teams available in case it was necessary to transfer wounded from Gaza, where the Islamist Hamas movement rules.
The president of the PNA, Mahmoud Abbas, decreed that a day of mourning will be marked this Friday, with the flags halfway up in Palestinian public buildings in the West Bank.
On the Israeli side, which together with Egypt has applied an air, sea and land blockade of Gaza since 2007, Defense Minister Beny Gantz reported that they offered to help "in the humanitarian evacuation of the wounded" and offered "the condolences of the State of Israel and the security establishment".
On the other hand, the UN envoy for the Middle East, Tor Wennesland, conveyed his condolences to the families of the deceased, as well as to the Palestinian government and people.
