An air attack on the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza is just the latest in a series of Israeli raids on areas it has claimed not to be targeting, it seems.

According to the BBC,

A large explosion rocked the Jabalia camp yesterday afternoon. Pictures taken at the scene by news agencies in the immediate aftermath showed several large craters surrounded by destroyed buildings. Children could be seen among the dead and injured, as people searched through the rubble for survivors.

BBC Verify geolocated the blast site to an area located within the refugee camp, which is made up of many residential buildings and was home to 116,000 people before the war.

The Israel Defense Forces later confirmed a strike, saying it had killed a senior Hamas commander, Ibrahim Biari, and targeted “underground terror infrastructure” beneath buildings that collapsed.

It said a “large number of terrorists were killed” and accused Hamas of intentionally using civilians as human shields. Hamas denied any commander had been there.

AFP news agency said their footage from the scene showed at least 47 bodies pulled from the rubble. A senior doctor at the nearby Indonesian Hospital told the BBC it received 120 dead, the majority women and children.

The BBC can’t independently confirm casualty figures. The IDF said it was looking into “reports of collateral damage and non-combatant casualties”.

This is not the only refugee camp to be hit by Israel.

Here‘s more from the BBC:

In central Gaza, there are four refugee camps. The BBC has verified strikes on two of them. Social media footage of the aftermath of a strike on al-Bureij camp on 17 October shows extensive rubble, flames, and bloodied bodies being carried out of the damage. We have verified the footage by matching up buildings in this footage with photos by news agencies of the aftermath. We also verified the footage location using a mosque that was visible.

Another camp nearby, al-Nuseirat, was struck the next day, on 18 October. We have verified social media footage of the aftermath, which shows ambulances, detritus, people trying to douse flames and a destroyed bakery. We located it by matching the shop names that can be seen in the video with those seen in photos published before the strike took place.

Despite the earlier 8 October warning instructing residents of the eastern and southern Maghazi area to go to camps in central Gaza, there do not appear to be any camps in the location specified on the tweet’s map.

We have however identified three camps nearby: al-Nuseirat and al-Bureij, hit by the strikes on the 17 and 18 October, and another camp called Deir al-Balah.

We cannot discount the possibility that there were then subsequent different instructions, but the BBC has not found any evidence of this.

There seems to be no evidence of a Hamas tunnel system beneath the Jabalya camp – or any of the others. If other information becomes available, This Site will update.

So Israel’s claim to be attacking Hamas seems specious. And the protestation that Hamas is using refugees and hostages as human shields seems to be nonsense.

What we see is Israel targeting refugees and hostages – innocent civilians – indiscriminately in yet another war crime to add to the list.

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