Five women and four children among dead with one strike hitting residential building in crowded Nuseirat camp
At least 16 people have been killed in Israeli airstrikes across central Gaza on Sunday night and Monday morning, including five women and four children, Palestinian health officials have said.
Rescuers said an airstrike early on Monday destroyed a residential building in the densely populated Nuseirat refugee camp in the heart of central Gaza, killing at least 10 people, including four women and two children.
The al-Awda hospital, which received the bodies, confirmed the deaths and said another 13 people were wounded. Hospital records quoted by local media show that the dead included a mother, her child and her five siblings.
In a separate strike targeting a building in Gaza City, six individuals lost their lives. A woman and two children were among the dead, according to the civil defence, a team of emergency responders working under the governance of Hamas.
Israel says its military operations exclusively target combatants and claims Hamas and other armed factions place civilians at risk by operating within residential areas.
Eleven months into the Gaza war, the death toll among Palestinians has passed 41,000, according to health authorities in the territory. Most of the dead are civilians and the total is nearly 2% of Gaza’s prewar population, or equal to one in every 50 people. The conflict was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people died and about 250 were taken hostage.
On Sunday evening, a senior Hamas official told Agence France-Presse that new generations of fighters had been recruited since the 7 October attacks, less than a week after the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, told journalists that Hamas, “no longer exists” as a military formation in Gaza.
