The non-governmental organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) condemned yesterday Wednesday “in the strongest possible way” an Israeli strike on a building where members of its staff and their families lived in the Gaza Strip, which resulted in the death of two relatives of her employee.

An Israeli tank opened fire last Tuesday night against a building where some of the MSF workers and their families live, in the Al Maghazi area, in Khan Younis, the theater of the last weeks of ground fighting and shelling, a press release from the NGO emphasized.

The attack “killed our colleague’s ancestor and wife and injured six people, including five women and children. The building, in which the MSF logo was prominently displayed, was “targeted by fire,” according to the statement, which specified that 64 people were inside at the time.

Then, ambulances that went to pick up the victims were “delayed for more than two hours due to shelling in the area”. They were eventually able to take the wounded to a field hospital in Rafah, on the southern tip of the Palestinian enclave, MSF added.

“We are shocked and deeply saddened by this deadly attack,” said Maini Nicolai, director general of MSF, who has been on a coordination mission in the Gaza Strip for the past few days.

“Today in Gaza the horrible reality is that there is no place that is safe, the promises of safe zones are hollow and the mechanisms to avoid hitting buildings where civilians are located are ineffective,” she added, stressing that they had been sent to the Israeli army coordinates of the building, in which a large logo of the NGO was prominently placed.

Asked about the strike, the Israeli army said it opened fire “during operations in Khan Younis” against a building in which “terrorist activities” had been “recognized” as taking place, but after the strike it received information “that the death of two civilians who were not involved’ in them.

He added that he is “sorry if civilians were harmed” and that he is doing “everything within his power to act in a precise manner on the battlefield”, assuring that this “incident” is being “examined”.

The war was sparked by an unprecedented attack by Hamas’ military arm against southern Israel on October 7, which killed more than 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data.

Israel’s civil-military leadership has vowed in retaliation to “wipe out” Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip since 2007, which the US and EU label a “terrorist” organization. The Israeli military’s retaliatory operations have cost the killed at least 29,313 people in the Gaza Strip, the majority of them women and children, according to the Hamas Health Ministry.