Israeli strikes kill 32 in Gaza; Apartments, tents, shelters and a police station targeted

Israeli airstrikes killed 32 people on Saturday, most of them women and children, Gaza’s Civil Defense said, as tensions remained high in the Gaza Strip despite a fragile cease-fire. Israel said the strikes were carried out in response to violations of the truce.

While deaths have been reported almost daily since the cease-fire with Hamas began in October, Saturday’s toll was unusually high.

“The death toll since dawn has risen to 32, mostly children and women,” the Civil Defense said in a statement after earlier reporting 28 deaths. The agency operates under Hamas authority.

Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said apartments, tents, shelters and a police station were targeted.

In the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, an apartment building was destroyed. “Three girls died in their sleep. We found their bodies in the street,” a relative, Samer al-Atbash, told AFP.

Elsewhere in Gaza City, a strike on a police station killed seven people, including civilians who were inside at the time, according to the police directorate. In Khan Younis in the south, a strike hit a tent sheltering displaced people, killing seven members of the same family, including a child, the government press office said.

In another nearby attack, Israeli forces struck a shelter in the al-Mawasi area, where tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have set up tents and makeshift housing. An AFP journalist reported smoke rising from the area amid thousands of tents.

Hamas condemned the strikes as a “brutal crime.”

In a statement, the Israeli military said the strikes were in retaliation for an incident Friday in which eight Palestinian fighters emerged from a tunnel in Rafah in what it described as a ceasefire violation. It said its forces targeted four commanders and other members of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad group.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 509 people have been killed by Israeli fire or airstrikes since the ceasefire began. Israel’s military said four of its soldiers have been killed in Gaza during the same period.

Israeli restrictions on media access prevent AFP from independently verifying casualty figures or reporting freely from Gaza.

Egypt and Qatar, which mediate between Israel and Hamas, condemned what they called Israel’s “repeated violations” of the ceasefire and urged all sides to exercise “maximum restraint” ahead of the expected reopening of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

Israel is set to reopen the crossing on Sunday for limited movement of people only. The decision comes as the humanitarian situation remains dire for Gaza’s more than 2 million residents.

Nearly all of Gaza’s population has been displaced at least once during more than two years of war, and hundreds of thousands continue to live in tents or makeshift shelters.

The war was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which killed 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official figures. At least 71,769 Palestinians have since been killed in Gaza by Israeli military operations, according to the Health Ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.