Israeli air strikes hit Gaza refugee camp as ground troops fight Hamas militants

Israel said the strike destroyed a Hamas command centre set up in civilian houses and a network of tunnels underneath.

The toll from the strikes in the Jabaliya camp was not immediately known.

The Israeli military said a large number of Hamas militants were killed, including the commander overseeing their operations in northern Gaza.

The director of the nearby hospital where casualties were taken, Dr Atef Al-Kahlot, said hundreds were wounded or killed, but he did not provide exact figures.

Neither side’s account could be independently confirmed.

The strike underlined the anticipated surge in casualties on both sides as Israeli troops battling Hamas militants advance deeper into the northern Gaza Strip towards dense, residential neighbourhoods.

Israel has vowed to crush Hamas’s ability to govern Gaza or threaten Israel following its bloody October 7 rampage, which ignited the war.

Israel said two of its soldiers were killed in fighting in northern Gaza, the first military deaths it reported since the ground offensive into the tiny Mediterranean territory accelerated late last week.

Several hundred thousand Palestinians remain in northern Gaza in the path of the ground assault. They have crowded into homes or are packed by the thousands in hospitals, already overwhelmed with patients and running low on supplies.

In the Jabaliya refugee camp – a densely built-up area of small streets on Gaza City’s outskirts – footage of the scene from Al-Jazeera TV showed at least four large craters where buildings once stood, amid a large swathe of rubble surrounded by partially collapsed structures.

Dozens of rescue workers and bystanders dug through the wreckage, searching for survivors beneath the pancaked buildings.

Young men carried the limp forms of two children from the upper floors of a damaged apartment block’s crumbling frame while helping down another child and woman.

It was unclear whether the children were alive or dead.

The Israeli military said it carried out a wide-scale strike in Jabaliya on Hamas infrastructure “that had taken over civilian buildings”.

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.

Also on Tuesday, the Israeli military said ground troops took control of a Hamas military stronghold in west Jabaliya, killing 50 militants.

Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem denied the military’s claim, saying it was trying to justify “its heinous crime” against civilians.

Brig Gen Hagari repeated calls for civilians to evacuate northern Gaza to the south.

The military says it targets Hamas fighters and infrastructure and that the militants endanger civilians by operating among them.

The military has also repeatedly emphasised it will strike Hamas wherever it finds it.

Some 800,000 Palestinians have reportedly fled to the south, but many have not, in part because they say nowhere is safe as Israeli air strikes in the south have continued to cause civilian deaths.

The window to flee may be closing, as Israeli forces reached Gaza’s main north-south highway this week.

More than 8,500 Palestinians have been killed in the war, mostly women and minors, the Gaza Health Ministry said on Tuesday, without providing a breakdown between civilians and fighters.

The figure is without precedent in decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

More than 1,400 people have died on the Israeli side, mainly civilians killed during Hamas’s initial attack, also an unprecedented figure.

Palestinian militants also abducted around 240 people during their incursion and have continued firing rockets into Israel.

A day after Israel’s first successful rescue of a captive held by Hamas, the spokesman of the militant group’s armed wing said they plan to release some non-Israeli hostages they are holding in the coming days.

Hamas has previously released four hostages, and has said it would let the others go in return for thousands of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, which has dismissed the offer.

More than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians have fled their homes, with hundreds of thousands sheltering in packed UN-run schools-turned-shelters or in hospitals alongside thousands of wounded patients.

The war has also threatened to ignite fighting on other fronts.

Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group have traded fire daily along the border, and Israel and the US have struck targets in Syria linked to Iran, which supports Hamas, Hezbollah and other armed groups in the region.

The military said it shot down what appeared to be a drone near the southernmost city of Eilat and intercepted a missile over the Red Sea on Tuesday, neither of which entered Israeli airspace.

Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen later claimed they fired ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, saying it was their third such operation and threatening more.

Earlier this month, a US navy destroyer in the Red Sea intercepted missiles and drones launched towards Israel by the Houthis, who control much of northern Yemen.

In the occupied West Bank, where Israeli-Palestinian violence has also surged, the army demolished the family home of Saleh al-Arouri, a senior Hamas official exiled more than a decade ago.

An official in the village of Aroura said the home had been vacant for 15 years.

Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said the military was deploying forces “on a large scale, in the depths of Gaza”.

“Achievements on the battlefield have been very high. Unfortunately, in war there is also a price, and in the last day the price has been high,” he said, referring to the two soldiers’ deaths.

Israeli forces have reportedly advanced north and east of Gaza City.

South of the city, Israeli troops were also trying to cut off the territory’s main highway and the parallel road along the Mediterranean coast, according to Dawood Shehab, a spokesperson for Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group allied with Hamas.

Zaki Abdel-Hay, a Palestinian living a few minutes’ walk from the road south of Gaza City, said people are afraid to use it.

“People are very scared. The Israeli tanks are still close,” he said over the phone, adding that “constant artillery fire” could be heard near the road.

The military said it struck some 300 militant targets over the past day, including compounds inside tunnels, and that troops had engaged in several battles with militants armed with anti-tank missiles and machine guns.

Gaza’s humanitarian crisis continued to worsen.

The World Health Organisation said two hospitals have been damaged and an ambulance destroyed in Gaza over the last two days.

It said all 13 hospitals operating in the north have received Israeli evacuation orders in recent days.

Medics have refused such orders, saying it would be a death sentence for patients on life support.

Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, the largest in the territory, is on the verge of running out of fuel, the Health Ministry said.

There has been no central electricity in Gaza for weeks, and Israel has barred the entry of fuel needed to power generators for hospitals and homes, saying it wants to prevent it from falling into Hamas’s hands.

It has allowed a limited amount of food, water, medicine and other supplies to enter from Egypt, though far less than what is needed, relief groups say.

A convoy of 59 aid trucks entered through the Rafah Crossing with Egypt on Tuesday – the largest yet – bringing the total that have entered since October 22 to 216, according to Wael Abu Omar, Hamas’s spokesperson for the crossing.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, said 64 of its staff have been killed since the start of the war, including a man killed alongside his wife and eight children in a strike late on Monday.