At least 31 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip on Saturday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said, killing at least 31 people, the highest single-day death toll in more than two months.
The reported death toll included six children, and another 30 people were injured, some in critical condition, the ministry said.
The latest deaths occur despite a ceasefire that took effect in mid-October, bringing the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since the ceasefire to more than 500.
Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for Gaza Civil Defense, an emergency response organization, said about a quarter of the bodies recovered were children and a third were women.
The dead included an elderly man and four female police officers.
Bassal said some people were trapped under rubble as Israeli military strikes targeted shelters, tents for displaced persons, residential apartments and police stations.
Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, director of Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex, told CNN that the death toll is expected to rise further as more seriously injured people are being taken to hospitals.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement that the attacks were launched against Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets across the Gaza Strip in response to “a violation of the ceasefire agreement that occurred yesterday (Friday) when eight terrorists escaped from an underground terrorist infrastructure in eastern Rafah.” The IDF announced Friday that it had killed three of the insurgents and captured one.
The IDF has carried out regular attacks in the Gaza Strip since the ceasefire went into effect, accusing Hamas of violating the terms of the agreement.
Samer al-Atbash, a relative of those killed in Saturday’s strike, said: “I suddenly woke up at 4am and found out that they (Israeli forces) had attacked three girls – my aunt, an old woman, and her daughter. She was a guest in our house. At that time, all my three nieces were on the street.”
“Truce, truce, what is our fault? What is our children’s fault? I don’t know what we have done. I don’t know what these three beloved children of God have done.”
The death toll was announced a day after local media reported that the Israeli military admitted in a briefing to Israeli journalists that some 70,000 Palestinians had died during the war in Gaza and that Health Ministry figures in the enclave were largely accurate.
“We estimate that around 70,000 Gazans have been killed in the war, including those missing,” Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronos quoted military officials as saying on Thursday. The country’s public broadcaster Kan 11 said the information came from the Coordinator of Territorial Government Affairs (COGAT) and that efforts were currently underway to analyze how many of those killed were civilians or militants.
The IDF said the “details published do not reflect official IDF data.” But an IDF spokesperson declined to say whether the military keeps or would release official data on Palestinians killed in Gaza.
Early in the war, Israel questioned the number of Palestinians killed in attacks by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and repeatedly accused the Health Ministry, which it says is controlled by Hamas, of inflating the numbers.
