Israeli warplanes struck a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip early on Sunday, killing at least 38 people and wounding dozens, health officials said.
The strike came as Israel said it would press on with its offensive to crush the
territory’s Hamas rulers, despite US appeals for a pause to get aid to desperate civilians.
Airstrikes hit the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza overnight, killing at least 38 people and wounding dozens more, Medhat Abbas, a spokesman for Gaza’s health ministry, said on Sunday.
Arafat Abu Mashaia, who lives in the camp, said the Israeli airstrike flattened several multi-storey homes where people forced out of other parts of Gaza were sheltering.
“It was a true massacre,” he said while standing on the wreckage of destroyed homes. “All here are peaceful people. I challenge anyone who says there were resistance (fighters) here.”
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
The camp, a built-up residential area, is located in the evacuation zone where Israel’s military had urged Palestinian civilians in Gaza to seek refuge as it focuses its military offensive on the north.
Despite such appeals, Israel has continued its bombardment across Gaza, saying it is targeting Hamas fighters and assets everywhere and accusing it of using civilians as human shields. Critics say Israel’s strikes are often disproportionate, considering the large number of women and children killed.
Reuters footage showed people searching throughrubble for victims or survivors at the refugee camp incentral Gaza. One man, crying, was being embraced by others.
Mohammad Al-Aloul, a photographer for Turkish news agency Anadolu, said he lost his four children, four of his brothers and their children in the strike, which destroyed his house.
“I was doing my job when I heard that an Israeli air strike targeted a residential district in Maghazi and that there are martyrs and injured,” Al-Aloul told Reuters.
“I arrived in hospital and found out that my four children, including my only daughter, were martyred.”
A separate strike on Sunday levelled a building near the Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service. The charity posted a video showing medical workers rushing a wounded man to the hospital as a woman and children ran behind them.
“Anyone in Gaza City is risking their life,” Israel’s minister of defence Yoav Gallant said.
An Israeli airstrike overnight struck a water well in Tal al-Zatar in northern Gaza, cutting off water for tens of thousands of people in the area, the Hamas-run municipality in the town of Beit Lahia said in a statement early on Sunday.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, at least two Palestinians were shot dead during an Israeli arrest raid in Abu Dis, just outside of Jerusalem, according to the Palestinian health ministry. At least 150 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the start of the war, mainly during violent protests and gun battles during arrest raids.
The soaring death toll in Gaza has sparked growing international anger, with tens of thousands from Washington to Berlin taking to the streets on Saturday to demand an immediate ceasefire.
Thousands of Israelis protested outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s official residence in Jerusalem on Saturday, urging him to resign and calling for the return of roughly 240 hostages held by Hamas.
