Gaza: Israeli forces kill deputy director of civil defence

Israeli forces killed the deputy director of civil defence in the north of the Gaza Strip, along with his family, Arabic media reported on Saturday.

According to Arabic news site Arabi21, civil defence crews announced that Colonel Abu Al-Abd Morsi was killed at his home, located in the Al-Alami area in Jabalia camp.

Early on Sunday, media outlets reported that four Palestinians were killed in an Israeli bombing of the Al-Alami area.

Civil defence crews and officials have been targeted by Israeli forces since the start of the war on the Gaza Strip, with around 100 of them killed since last October.

The civil defence said in July that Colonel Mohammed Osama Hamad, the deputy director of the fire and rescue department was also killed, while eight other crew members were wounded as they were trying to rescue people from a residential building that was bombed by Israeli war planes in the southern Gaza Strip.

"The targeting of crews comes within a framework of a series of ongoing Israeli violations against people who provide purely humanitarian services and seek to save lives" the civil defence said in a statement. 

They called the attacks on crews a "flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and all the Geneva Conventions that guarantee freedom of action for humanitarian service providers."

In June, civil defence crews were also targeted while they were in the Nuseirat camp, with at least three of them killed.

The organisation called on the international community to provide protection for their crews, saying they had become a "clear target for the occupation’s military machine".

Israel’s war on the besieged enclave has killed at least 40,939 Palestinians since October, with an additional 94,616 wounded in the same time frame.

The war has levelled entire neighbourhoods and plunged the enclave into a deep humanitarian crisis.

According to international charity Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), as of 25 June, 500 healthcare workers had been killed in Gaza since the start of the military assault.

This equates to an average of two healthcare workers killed every day, with one in every 40 healthcare workers, or 2.5% of Gaza’s healthcare workforce, now dead.

MAP has repeatedly called for an independent investigation and an end to impunity over the killing of healthcare workers, noting that the systematic attacks are exacerbating the disastrous situation in Gaza.