Israeli air strikes on a refugee camp near Gaza City have levelled apartment buildings and reportedly killed at least 50 people — including a senior Hamas leader — as ground troops battle militants across northern Gaza and attack underground compounds.
Israel launched its siege after Hamas-led militants burst over the border and rampaged through nearby Israeli towns and kibbutzim on October 7, killing some 1,400 people and taking more than 200 hostages, according to Israeli authorities.
Gaza's Health Ministry said on Tuesday local time that an estimated 8,525 people — including an estimated 3,542 children— had been killed in Israel's three-week-old air and ground onslaught. The director of Gaza's Indonesian Hospital told Al Jazeera that more than 50 Palestinians were killed and 150 wounded in Israeli air strikes on a densely populated area of the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.
Jabalia, which lies on Gaza City's outskirts within the main northern ground zone of combat between dug-in Hamas militants and Israeli troops and tanks, houses families of refugees from wars with Israel dating back to 1948.
Marwan Jilani, director general of the Palestinian Red Crescent, told CNN that its ambulances had transported 30 bodies to hospitals.
"This is only our ambulances," he said. "We are only one service in addition to the civil defence and the Ministry of Health ambulance services.
"So we expect that the toll to increase. There are so many people under the rubble we cannot reach."
IDF Brigadier General Daniel Hagari said an underground Hamas installation beneath a targeted building collapsed, toppling other nearby buildings.
He said the commander killed in the strike, Ibrahim Biari, had played a role in the October 7 attack on Israel.
AFP footage from the scene showed at least 47 bodies recovered from the rubble after the strike hit several houses in the densely crowded camp.
"There's no exaggerating when they talk about hundreds of martyrs and wounded."
People were still "transporting the remains of children, women and elderly", he added.
Source: ABC.AU
Original story: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-01/israel-gaza-war-latest-updates/103046888
