Warplanes strike Gaza refugee camps as Israel rejects call to suspend fighting

Israeli planes have struck a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, killing at least 40 people and wounding dozens more, 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.

Israel has refused to halt its offensive, even for brief humanitarian pauses proposed by US secretary of state Antony Blinken during his tour of the region.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said more than 9,700 Palestinians have been killed in the territory in nearly a month of war, and that number is likely to rise as Israeli troops advance into dense urban neighbourhoods.

Air strikes hit the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza overnight, killing at least 40 people and wounding 34 others, the Health Ministry said.

An Associated Press reporter at a nearby hospital saw eight dead children, including a baby, who had been brought in after the strike.

Arafat Abu Mashaia, who lives in the camp, said the air strike flattened several multi-storey homes where people forced out of other parts of Gaza were sheltering.

“It was a true massacre,” he said early on Sunday 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 in the evacuation zone where Israel’s military had urged Palestinian civilians to seek refuge as it focuses its military offensive on the north.

Another air strike hit a house near a school at the Bureji refugee camp in central Gaza on Sunday and staff at Al-Aqsa Hospital said at least 13 people were killed. The camp is home to an estimated 46,000 people and was struck on Thursday as well.

Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip fell under its third total communications outage since the start of the war, with Palestinian communications company Paltel saying all its communication and internet services were down. Internet access advocacy group NetBlocks.org reported a “new collapse in connectivity” across the besieged enclave.

“We have lost communication with the vast majority of the UNRWA team members,” UN Palestinian refugee agency spokeswoman Juliette Touma told the Associated Press. The first Gaza outage lasted 36 hours and the second one for a few hours.

Despite 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 civilians killed.

Large areas of residential neighbourhoods in northern Gaza have been levelled in air strikes. The UN office for humanitarian affairs says more than half the remaining residents, estimated at around 300,000, are sheltering in UN-run facilities, but Israeli strikes have also repeatedly hit and damaged those shelters.

Israeli planes again dropped leaflets urging people to head south during a four-hour window on Sunday. Crowds of people could be seen walking down the Gaza Strip’s main north-south highway with only what they could carry in their arms.

Another Israeli air strike overnight struck a water well in Tal al-Zatar in northern Gaza, cutting off supplies for tens of thousands of people, the Hamas-run municipality in the town of Beit Lahia said in a statement.

The UN said about 1.5 million people in the Gaza Strip, or 70% of the population, have fled their homes. Food, water and the fuel needed for generators that power hospitals and other facilities are running out.

The war has stoked tensions across the region, with Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group repeatedly trading fire along the border.

In the occupied West Bank, at least two Palestinians were shot dead during an Israeli arrest raid in Abu Dis, just outside Jerusalem, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. The military said a militant who had set up an armed cell and fired at Israeli forces was killed during the raid.

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.

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.

He has refused to take responsibility for the October 7 attack by Hamas in southern Israel that killed more than 1,400 people. Ongoing Palestinian rocket fire has forced tens of thousands of people in Israel to evacuate their homes.

In another reflection of widespread anger in Israel, a junior government minister, Amihai Eliyahu, suggested in a radio interview on Sunday that Israel could drop an atomic bomb on Gaza. He later walked back the remarks, saying they were “metaphorical”.

Mr Netanyahu issued a statement saying the minister’s comments were “not based in reality” and that Israel would continue to try to avoid harming civilians. He suspended Mr Eliyahu from cabinet meetings, but the move has no practical effect.

Among the Palestinians killed in Gaza are more than 4,800 children, the Health Ministry said, without providing a breakdown of civilians and fighters.

The Israeli military said 29 of its soldiers have died during the ground operation.