IDF says ‘technical error’ responsible for deadly strike on Gaza water collection point

The Israel Defence Forces said a “technical error with the munition” caused an airstrike aimed at an Islamic Jihad terrorist to fall dozens of metres from the target, killing at least 10 people including six children at a water collection point.

Amid widespread criticism of the incident the IDF added it “works to mitigate harm to uninvolved civilians as much as possible” and “regrets any harm to uninvolved civilians”.

Officials at Al Awda Hospital said it received 10 bodies after the Israeli strike on the water collection point and six children were among the dead.

The IDF said it had opened up an investigation into the incident, and stressed it worked to fight against terrorist organisations in Gaza, and not ordinary citizens.

Footage of the incident was broadcast on television news broadcasts, including by the BBC, ITV and Sky News, with some of the scenes to graphic to shown.

Ramadan Nassar, a witness who lives in the area, told the Associated Press that around 20 children and 14 adults had been lined up to get water.

He said Palestinians walk some 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) to fetch water from the area.

Water shortages in Gaza have worsened sharply in recent weeks, with fuel shortages causing desalination and sanitation facilities to close, making people dependent on collection centers where they can fill up their plastic containers.

The strike came as Israeli aerial attacks across the Gaza Strip have escalated, with further unconfirmed accounts of deaths after a succession of strikes on residential buildings in central Gaza and Gaza City.

Meanwhile Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert has sharply criticised plans outlined by Defence Minister Israel Katz for the construction of a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of southern Gaza, to house initially 600,000 people and eventually the entire Palestinian population.

“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” he told the Guardian in an interview published on Sunday.

“If they [Palestinians] will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing. It hasn’t yet happened,” Olmert said. That would be “the inevitable interpretation” of any attempt to create a camp for hundreds of thousands of people, he said.

Olmert, Israel’s PM from 2006 to 2009, also said growing anger against Israel  cannot all be written off as antisemitism.

He told the newspaper: “In the United States there is more and more and more expanding expressions of hatred to Israel,” he said.

“We make a discount to ourselves saying: ‘They are antisemites.’

“I don’t think that they are only antisemites, I think many of them are anti-Israel because of what they watch on television, what they watch on social networks.”

Some senior IDF members, including  Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, the chief of the general staff, have said that the military’s duties should not involve forcibly moving civilians either within or out of the Gaza Strip.

He argued the plan was not part of the stated objectives of the war: to destroy Hamas and free the remaining hostages.