Live Updates: Israel Strikes Gaza Hospital Complex
A tent encampment caught fire early Monday on the grounds of a hospital complex in central Gaza after the Israeli military carried out a strike on the compound, where it said Hamas fighters had been embedded.
Video footage taken by The Associated Press and the Reuters news agency on Monday morning shows people looking through smoking debris and trying to extinguish fires at the encampment, in the city of Deir al Balah. Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, reported early Monday that four people had been killed and about 70 others injured during an Israeli attack on displaced people sheltering in tents at a hospital complex there.
The Israeli military said early Monday that it had struck what it described as a Hamas command center within a former hospital, and that the armed group had used it to coordinate attacks against Israeli troops. That claim could not be independently confirmed.
The strike in Gaza followed a weekend of intense military activity along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, home of the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah.
The Israeli military said on Sunday that a drone strike by Hezbollah on a military base in northern Israel had killed four soldiers and injured dozens of others, and that the group had fired more than 100 rockets toward Israel on Sunday alone.
And as a weekslong Israeli assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon continued, the Lebanese government said on Sunday that over 23 people had been killed over the past day.
Here’s what else to know:
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U.S. pledges forces to Israel: The United States said on Sunday that it was sending an advanced missile defense system to Israel, along with around 100 American troops to operate it. That will mark the first deployment of American forces to Israel since the Hamas-led attacks there last October. The Israeli military is weighing a retaliatory attack on Iran, which launched about 200 missiles at Israel on Oct. 1.
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Israeli tanks enter U.N. peacekeeping base: Israeli tanks entered a United Nations peacekeeping base early Sunday morning, according to the U.N. The mission said the presence of Israeli forces there risked undermining the U.N.’s neutral status and made its personnel a target for Hezbollah. The Israeli military said that its forces were trying to evacuate troops who had come under Hezbollah missile fire.
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Reporting from Lebanon: Journalists from The New York Times and other news organizations entered southern Lebanon on Sunday under the supervision of the Israeli military. They visited what the military said was a secret Hezbollah outpost equipped with explosives and mines.