The United Nations Human Rights Office assured on Wednesday that the Israeli air attack against the Jabaliyia refugee camp, in northern Gaza, may constitute a "war crime", in statements that join the "dismay "which senior representatives of the same organization and the European Union had expressed hours before. The camp, which housed more than 116,000 people, according to the last record of the UN Palestine Refugee Agency (UNRWA) in July this year, was hit by a missile on Tuesday, causing a giant crater in the middle of a group of buildings before being targeted by a second bombing on Wednesday.
"Given the high number of civilian casualties [and] the scale of destruction following the Israeli airstrikes on the Jabaliya refugee camp, we have serious concerns that these are disproportionate attacks that could constitute war crimes," the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote on his X (formerly Twitter) profile.
The Hamas government in Gaza yesterday confirmed the deaths of at least 195 people in both attacks, while more than 100 are feared buried under the rubble. Some 777 people were injured. Previously, the surgical director of the Indonesian hospital, Mohamed el Ron, informed the BBC that he had received 400 people, of whom 120 were dead, and the majority were women and children. Several of the most seriously injured were taken to Al Shifa hospital "under fire" from fighting and shelling, he added.
The devastating attack on Jabaliyia came as Israeli troops advanced on land into Gaza from at least three directions. An Israeli army spokesman said the attack had been authorized to kill a senior Hamas commander and destroy his base. The mission was accomplished.
Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari named the target as Ibrahim Biari, commander of the Central Jabaliya Battalion, who he said had been leading the fighting in northern Gaza from a network of tunnels beneath the camp. As he reported, Biari had also played a key role in planning the October 7 attacks on Israel, in which more than 1,400 people were massacred, most of them civilians, and more than 200 people were taken hostage.
Hagari assured that the enormous destruction caused by Israel's airstrike - which, according to the images, would have produced at least five craters - was due to the fact that Hamas tunnels were located beneath the buildings. Likewise, he refused to provide a figure for civilian deaths until he had information on the number of Islamist group fighters killed in the attack.
The Gaza Strip, controlled by the Hamas Islamic Resistance Movement since 2006, is home to some 2.3 million people in one of the most densely populated territories on earth, and they have lived under Israel's blockade for 17 years. . Of them, more than half (1.7 million) live in eight refugee camps. Rafah, in the south, is the most populated, with more than 133,000 inhabitants, according to the latest record provided by UNRWA last summer, followed by Jabaliyia, in the north.
Before the hostilities, more than 116,000 people lived in the 1.4 square kilometer area of the Jabaliyia camp. It contains 26 schools managed by UNRWA and three health centres.
It should be noted that the start of the Israeli bombings and Tel Aviv's order to evacuate the north of the strip have caused the displacement of a million Gazans to the south, so it is to be expected that the number of refugees housed in Rafah and the other fields in the southern half have increased considerably. Israel's airstrikes have killed 9,061 people, including more than 3,000 children, and injured more than 32,000, the Gaza Ministry of Health reported this Thursday.
The existence of refugee camps in Gaza dates back to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, in a process that saw the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in other parts of historic Palestine in what is known as the nakba (catastrophe , in Arabic). Since then they have lived trapped in the strip (as well as in the West Bank), just a few kilometers from their original homes and cities. Already in the summer of that same year, Israel rejected the return of the refugees.
