Israeli air strikes overnight and early on Sunday have killed at least 28 Palestinian people, the Gaza Strip’s civil defence agency said.
A civil agency spokesman said at least 13 people were killed in an air strike on a house in Deir al-Balah – a town in central Gaza – belonging to the Abu Samra family.
He said eight people, including four children, were killed in the attack on the Musa Bin Nusayr school, which had been repurposed as a shelter for Palestinians displaced by the war.
An overnight Israeli air strike killed three people in the southern city of Rafah, and a drone strike this morning hit a car in Gaza City, killing four people, he added.
Israel has continued to carry out daily strikes in Gaza more than 14 months into the war with Hamas. It says it only targets militants, whom it accuses of hiding among civilians, but the bombings frequently kill women and children.
Pope Francis has reiterated his condemnation of Israel’s air strikes on the Gaza Strip, denouncing their “cruelty” for the second time in as many days.
“And with pain I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children being machine-gunned, of the bombings of schools and hospitals. What cruelty,” the pontiff (88) said after his weekly Angelus prayer. It comes a day after the pope condemned an Israeli airstrike that reportedly killed seven children from one family on Friday.
The war began on October 7th, 2023, when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel in a surprise attack, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250. Around 100 hostages are still in Gaza, at least a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s subsequent bombardment and ground invasion have killed more than 45,000 people in Gaza, more than half of them women and children, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between fighters and civilians in its count.
The offensive has caused widespread destruction and displaced some 90 per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, often multiple times. Hundreds of thousands are packed into squalid tent camps along the coast as the cold, wet winter sets in.
Israel has been carrying out a major operation in northern Gaza since early October, battling Hamas in the most isolated and heavily damaged part of the territory. Tens of thousands have fled as the military has ordered a complete evacuation and allowed almost no humanitarian aid to enter.
The Israeli military body overseeing civilian affairs in Gaza, known as Cogat, said it had facilitated the evacuation of more than 100 patients, caregivers and others from the Kamal Adwan Hospital and the Awda Hospital in the far north, which have struggled to function.
Cogat said it had also facilitated the delivery of 5,000 litres of fuel and food packages to the hospitals. – AP