Dozens killed and injured in Israeli attack on Gaza tent camp, Gaza agency says
Israeli missiles set ablaze a tent camp for displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza, killing or wounding dozens of people, the enclave’s civil emergency service said on Tuesday, in what the Israeli military called a strike on a Hamas command centre.
The Hamas-run Gaza government media office put the number of fatalities at more than 40. It said that at least 60 others were wounded in the strikes and many remained missing as rescue workers continued their searches early on Tuesday.
Residents and medics said the tent encampment near Khan Younis in the Al-Mawasi area, which Israel has designated a humanitarian safe zone for displaced Palestinians, was struck by at least four missiles. The camp is crowded with families ordered by the Israeli military to flee there from elsewhere in the territory.
The Gaza civil emergency service said at least 20 tents caught fire, and missiles caused craters as deep as nine metres. It said the victims included women and children but did not immediately provide a breakdown of deaths and injuries.
There was no immediate comment from the Gaza Health Ministry, which compiles casualty figures. Earlier, the Hamas-aligned Shehab News Agency said 40 Palestinians were killed.
“Our teams are still moving out martyrs and wounded from the targeted area. It looks like a new Israeli massacre,” a Gaza civil emergency official said.
The official said that teams had been struggling to search for victims who might have been buried.
The Israeli military said it “struck significant Hamas terrorists who were operating within a command and control centre embedded inside the Humanitarian Area in Khan Younis.”
“The terrorists advanced and carried out terror attacks against IDF troops and the state of Israel,” the statement said, referring to the Israeli Defence Forces.
Hamas denies fighters in camp
Hamas, the Islamist group that controlled Gaza before the conflict, denied Israeli allegations that gunmen were present in the targeted area, and rejected accusations it exploited civilian areas for military purposes.
“This is a clear lie that aims to justify these ugly crimes. The resistance has denied several times that any of its members exist within civilian gatherings or use these places for military purposes,” said Hamas in a statement.
Ambulances raced between the tent camp and a nearby hospital, while Israeli jets could still be heard overhead, residents said.
Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forced from their homes at least once, and some have had to flee as many as 10 times.
Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed more than 40,900 Palestinians, according to the local Health Ministry. Israel attacked the enclave after Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage in a surprise attack on Oct. 7, according to Israeli tallies.
The two warring sides each blame the other for a failure so far to reach a ceasefire that would end the fighting and see the release of hostages.
Published at Tue, 10 Sep 2024 11:03:09 +0000
SpaceX launches crew for first-ever private spacewalk mission
A crew of four private astronauts ascended into space early Tuesday on a risky SpaceX mission to attempt the first-ever private spacewalk using the company’s new spacesuits and a redesigned spacecraft.
A billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees were launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, the spacecraft’s fifth private space mission so far.
The SpaceX mission, called Polaris Dawn, will last about five days in an oval-shaped orbit that passes as close to Earth as 190 kilometres and as far as 1,400 km, the farthest any humans will have travelled since the end of the United States’ Apollo moon program in 1972.
The spacewalk is planned for the mission’s third day at 700 km in altitude and will last around 20 minutes. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon craft will slowly depressurize its entire cabin — it has no airlock like the International Space Station (ISS) — and all four astronauts will rely on their slimmed-down, SpaceX-built spacesuits for oxygen.
The first U.S. spacewalk was in 1965, aboard a Gemini capsule, and used a similar procedure to the one planned for Polaris Dawn: the capsule was depressurized, the hatch opened and a spacesuited astronaut ventured outside on a tether.
Only highly trained, well-funded government astronauts have done spacewalks in the past. There have been roughly 270 on the ISS since its creation in 2000, and 16 by Chinese astronauts on Beijing’s Tiangong space station.
Range of experiments planned
Jared Isaacman, 41, a pilot and the billionaire founder of electronic payment company Shift4, is bankrolling the Polaris mission, as he did for his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021. He has declined to say how much he is paying for the missions, but they are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Joining him is mission pilot Scott Poteet, 50, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant-colonel; and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis, 30, and Anna Menon, 38, both senior engineers at the company.
For the spacewalk, Isaacman and Gillis will exit the spacecraft tethered by an oxygen line while Poteet and Menon stay in the cabin.
The mission is the first in Isaacman’s private Polaris program that includes a follow-on Crew Dragon mission in the future, followed by a flight on SpaceX’s Starship, a giant rocket the company has spent billions of dollars developing as a flagship moon and Mars vehicle.
The four-person crew are effectively test subjects for an array of scientific experiments that will aim to shed light on how cosmic radiation and the vacuum of space affect the human body, adding to decades of studies on astronauts living aboard the ISS.
Since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011, NASA has relied heavily on the company and its Crew Dragon, which has flown nine astronaut missions to and from the ISS for the agency as the only U.S. crew-grade vehicle in operation.
The company has previously flown four private missions: Isaacman’s Inspiration4, and three private astronaut flights arranged by Houston-based mission broker Axiom Space.
An attempt to launch last month was postponed hours before liftoff over a small helium leak in ground equipment on SpaceX’s launchpad. SpaceX fixed the leak, but the company’s Falcon 9 was then grounded by U.S. regulators over a booster recovery failure during an unrelated mission, further delaying the Polaris launch.
Boeing is struggling to develop a similar spacecraft, Starliner, that could rival Crew Dragon. But Starliner’s latest NASA test mission that began in June — its first time flying a crew — left its astronauts on the ISS last week because of issues with its propulsion system.
Published at Tue, 10 Sep 2024 10:14:14 +0000
