The overnight strikes on Rafah city killed 22 people, most of them children, with one of the victims only 18 months old.
Israel carried out deadly strikes in Gaza, first responders in the war-battered Palestinian territory said on Sunday, as violence flared in the occupied West Bank.
The latest bombardments came as lawmakers in Israel’s top ally, the United States, approved US$13 billion in new Israeli military aid even as global criticism mounts over the death toll and dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
However, fears of wider war breaking out in the Middle East have eased somewhat after Iran downplayed Israel’s reported retaliation over its unprecedented missile and drone attack on the country a week ago.
Attention has turned back towards the war in Gaza, which Israel hit with several strikes overnight. Health officials said on Sunday the strikes killed 22 people, including 18 children.
The first Israeli strike in the southern Gaza city of Rafah killed a man, his wife and their three-year-old child, according to the nearby Kuwaiti Hospital, which received the bodies. The woman was pregnant and the doctors managed to save the baby, the hospital said.
The second strike killed 17 children and two women, all from an extended family, according to hospital records. Mohammed al-Beheiri said his daughter, Rasha, and her six children, the youngest 18 months old, were among those killed. Her husband’s second wife and their three children were still under the rubble, al-Beheiri said.
Resident Umm Hassan Kloub, 35, said her children screamed when they “woke up to a nightmare of an explosion”.
“Every second we live in terror, even the sound of Israeli aircraft doesn’t stop,” she said. “We don’t know whether we will live or die. This is not life.”
Soon after the war began, when Hamas militants from Gaza attacked southern Israel on October 7, Israel told Palestinians in northern Gaza to move to “safe zones” further south such as Rafah.
Around 1.5 million of Gaza’s 2.4 million people are now estimated to be sheltering in the city. However, Israel has for two months threatened to invade the city in its mission to destroy Hamas.
The G7 group of developed economies said on Friday that it opposed a “full-scale military operation” there, fearing “catastrophic consequences” for Rafah’s civilians.
