The Mauritanian government declared yesterday Tuesday three days of national mourning following the deadly attack on a hospital in the Gaza Strip and called on the international community to make sure to stop “immediately” what he described as “genocide” of the Palestinians.

At least 200 people were killed last night when a hospital in Gaza City was struck, the health ministry of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas said, blaming Israel for the strike. The Israeli military, for its part, cited a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian Islamist movement allied with Hamas, that hit the hospital.

“The Islamic Republic of Mauritania expresses its condemnation and denounces the heinous crime and gruesome carnage committed (…) by the Israeli war machine, which bombed a hospital in Gaza,” according to a government statement in Nouakchott.

The Mauritanian government “calls on the international community to assume its legal and humanitarian responsibilities, to impose a complete halt to the genocide of the Palestinian people and to offer them urgent protection,” the text continues.

Flags will fly at half-mast in the country for three days.

The bombing of the hospital sparked strong reactions, notably from Jordan and the Arab League, which condemned Israel, while protesters took to the streets in the occupied West Bank, Amman, Tunis, Tehran and elsewhere.