GAZA’s civil defence agency said on Friday that at least 15 people were killed in Israeli strikes on Beit Lahia, in the north of the Hamas-run territory.
The area has been subjected to a major Israeli offensive for almost two months.
The homes of the Baba and Ahmed families were hit in the past 24 hours by Israeli strikes, agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP, adding that they “were able to retrieve only 10 bodies”.
He said dozens more were feared buried under the rubble of the two homes.
“A person went with a horse-drawn cart to retrieve the dead from the bombing of the Baba family home. It was targeted by an Israeli drone while it was on its way back to Kamal Adwan Hospital, which resulted in the deaths of five additional people.”
The north of the Gaza Strip has been the target of an Israeli offensive since October 6, aimed at preventing Hamas from regrouping.
The Kamal Adwan hospital, on the edges of Beit Lahia and Jabalia, said that the head of its intensive care unit, Ahmed al-Kahlout, was killed in an Israeli strike.
Asked about the doctor’s death, the Israeli military said it was “unaware of a strike that occurred in this location or timeframe”.
The war was sparked by Palestinian group Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that resulted in the deaths of 1,207 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed 44,363 people in Gaza, according to figures from the territory’s health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable.
