Israel injures Palestinian man during overnight attacks on besieged Gaza Strip

The Israeli military injured a Palestinian man in the besieged Gaza Strip when a shell hit his home in a refugee camp.

2 min read

20 January, 2021

Gaza is under siege by Israel [Getty]

A Palestinian man was injured on Tuesday night by shrapnel from an artillery shell fired by the Israeli military towards the besieged Gaza Strip.

The shell, which came from an Israeli tank, hit a house in the Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, injuring the man in his leg.

He was transferred to a hospital in Deir Al-Balah, according to Palestinian news agency WAFA.

A medical source told WAFA that he was in a stable condition.

The tank was stationed behind the Israeli border fence with Gaza.

Israeli tanks also fired on several locations east of Gaza City, as well as near the Bureij and Maghazi refugee camps in the central Gaza Strip and a site east of the town of Beit Hanoun, in the north of the besieged Palestinian enclave.

Read more: Refugees at home - Palestinians in Gaza refuse to forget Nakba on World Refugee Day

The Israeli military said it had fired on Hamas positions.

"Late in the evening a rocket was launched from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory," the Israeli army said in a statement on WhatsApp.

"In response Israeli tanks struck Hamas positions" in the south of the Gaza strip, it said.

Over a decade of siege

In 2006, Israel imposed a land, sea, and air blockade on the strip, effectively turning the coastal enclave into an open-air prison, where basic necessities such as food, fuel and medicines are severely restricted.

Israel insists its blockade is necessary to isolate Hamas, with which it has fought three wars since 2008, bringing devastation to the Gaza Strip.

Critics say the blockade, along with periodic bombardment of Gaza amounts to collective punishment of the coastal enclave's 2 million residents.

In 2014, the UN - along with four other human rights organisations - said that the Gaza Strip could end up becoming 'uninhabitable' because of Israel's policies. The decade-long siege has plunged hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into poverty.

Nearly 70 percent of Gaza's population is food insecure and around 80 percent of Palestinians in the beseiged enclave are reliant on international aid, according to the United Nations.

Out of Gaza's 1.8 million population, 1.4 million are refugees whose ancestors were forced out of their homes in what is now Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

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