French diplomacy emphasized yesterday Thursday that Paris “condemns” the deadly shootings that hit the UN facility last Wednesday where tens of thousands of displaced people have taken refuge in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, while calling on Israel to “observe international law”.

“The facilities of the United Nations and the personnel of humanitarian organizations, whose work is absolutely necessary for the civilian population, there is an absolute need to be protected”, says a press release issued by the KD d’Orsay, recalling that “the protection of civilians ” is both a “moral necessity” and an “international obligation”.

He called on Israel to “obey international law, which always and everywhere imposes clear principles of distinction, necessity, proportionality and precautions.”

However, France’s foreign ministry refrained from explicitly blaming the Israeli army for the shooting.

Earlier Wednesday, the United Nations said, tanks opened fire on an educational center in Khan Younis that was turned into a shelter for displaced people after war broke out in the Palestinian enclave on October 7.

Those strikes killed 13 people and injured 56 others, 21 of whom are in critical condition, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

The UN reported yesterday to AFP that the Israeli army ordered the immediate removal of tens of thousands of displaced people from the shelter it is hosting by 17:00 today (local time and Greek time).

The Israeli army, for its part, said it had not given “any specific order for immediate evacuation” either to UNRWA or to “those who remain” in and around the shelter.

He also emphasized that he “rules out” the possibility that there was an “airstrike” of his own or that the installation was hit by his “artillery”, leaving open the “possibility” that it was Hamas fire.

UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Philippe Lazzarini, earlier condemned the “flagrant violation of the most fundamental rules of war”, stressing that the coordinates of the training center had been “given to the Israeli authorities”.

According to an AFP journalist, there was incessant shelling yesterday in Khan Younis, the birthplace of Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip and considered the architect of the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement’s military arm on southern sectors of Israeli territory on October 7th.

The attack killed some 1,140 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official statements.

About 250 more people were abducted and taken to the Gaza Strip, of whom about a hundred were released in late November in a Palestinian prisoner swap during a week-long truce.

In retaliation for the Hamas attack, Israel’s civil-military leadership vowed to “wipe out” the Palestinian Islamist movement, and its military operations since then, the most extensive ever conducted in the Gaza Strip, have killed at least 25,900 people, the vast majority women and children, according to the latest report from the Hamas Health Ministry.