ISRAELI strikes on northern Gaza have killed at least 22 people, Palestinian medical officials have said.
The Gaza Health Ministry’s emergency service said 11 women and two children were among those killed in the strikes late on Saturday in the northern town of Beit Lahiya.
It said another 15 people were wounded and that the death toll could rise.
The Israeli military said it carried out a “precise strike” on militants in a structure in Beit Lahiya and took steps to avoid harming civilians. It disputed what it said were “numbers published by the media”.
Israel has been waging an air and ground offensive in northern Gaza for the last three weeks after saying Hamas militants had regrouped there.
Hundreds of people have been killed and tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled to Gaza City in the latest wave of displacement in the yearlong war.
Israel is carrying out daily strikes across Gaza, even as it wages war with the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon.
The International Committee of the Red Cross on Saturday said that ongoing Israeli evacuation orders and restrictions on the entry of essential supplies to the north had left the civilian population in “horrific circumstances”.
“Many civilians are currently unable to move, trapped by fighting, destruction or physical constraint and now lack access to even basic medical care,” it said.
On Saturday, Israeli warplanes attacked Iran – which backs both Hamas and Hezbollah – in response to an Iranian ballistic missile attack earlier this month.
The cascading conflicts have raised fears of an all-out regional war pitting Israel and the United States against Iran and its militant proxies, which also include the Houthi rebels in Yemen and armed groups in Syria and Iraq.
Israel says its strikes on Gaza only target militants and it blames Hamas for civilian casualties because the militants fight in densely populated areas. The military rarely comments on individual strikes, which often kill women and children.
The war began when Hamas-led militants blew holes in Israel’s border wall and stormed into southern Israel in a surprise attack on October 2023. They killed around 1200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250. Around 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, around a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, according to the local Health Ministry. It does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count but says more than half of those killed were women and children.
The offensive has devastated much of the impoverished coastal territory and displaced around 90% of its population, often multiple times. Hundreds of thousands of people have crowded into squalid tent camps along the coast, and aid groups say hunger is rampant.
