Palestinians displaced by the Israeli air and ground offensive on the Gaza Strip arrive at a makeshift tent camp west of Rafah, Gaza. File.
| Photo Credit: AP

Palestinian medics said 22 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike Sunday on the southern Gaza city of Rafah that hit tents for displaced people.

There were no immediate details on the target, but footage from the scene showed heavy destruction. The Israeli army said it was unaware of anything occurring in the area.

A spokesperson with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said the death toll was likely to increase as search and rescue efforts continued in Rafah’s Tal al-Sultan neighbourhood west of the city centre.

The society asserted that the location had been designated by Israel as a “humanitarian area”.

The strike comes two days after the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to end its military offensive in Rafah.

Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, was in Rafah on Sunday and was briefed on the “deepening of operations” there, his office said.

Earlier, Hamas fired a barrage of rockets from Gaza that set off air raid sirens as far away as Tel Aviv for the first time in months on Sunday in a show of resilience more than seven months into Israel’s massive air, sea and ground offensive.

There were no immediate reports of casualties in what appeared to be the first long-range rocket attack from Gaza since January. Hamas’ military wing claimed the attack. Palestinian militants have sporadically fired rockets and mortar rounds at communities along the Gaza border, and the military arm of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group later Sunday said it fired rockets at nearby communities.

The war between Israel and Hamas has killed nearly 36,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and fighters in its count. The Health Ministry said the bodies of 81 people killed by Israeli strikes had been brought to hospitals over the past 24 hours. Israel blames civilian deaths on Hamas because the militants operate in dense, residential areas.

Around 80% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have fled their homes, severe hunger is widespread and U.N. officials say parts of the territory are experiencing famine.

Hamas triggered the war with its Oct. 7 attack into Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and seized some 250 hostages. Hamas still holds some 100 hostages and the remains of around 30 others after most of the rest were released during a cease-fire last year.

The war has also heightened tensions in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Palestinian authorities on Sunday said Israeli forces shot dead a 14-year-old boy near the southern West Bank town of Saeer. The Israeli army did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Southern Gaza has been largely cut off from aid since Israel launched what it called a limited incursion into Rafah on May 6. Since then over 1 million Palestinians, many already displaced, have fled the city.

U.S. President Joe Biden on March 5 called on Hamas to accept a Gaza ceasefire deal by the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, while the Palestinian militant group warned talks for a truce and hostage release cannot go on “indefinitely”.

As famine threatens Gazans, U.S. and Jordanian planes again airdropped food aid into the besieged territory of 2.4 million people in a joint operation with Egypt and France.

Bombing and fighting in the war sparked by the October 7 attack killed another 97 people in Gaza, said the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, where Israel said its jets had struck 50 targets over the past day.

In Cairo, U.S. and Hamas envoys were meeting Egyptian and Qatari mediators in protracted negotiations to end the fighting and free hostages before Ramadan starts on March 10 or 11.

Egypt’s Al-Qahera News, which is close to the country’s intelligence services, said the talks were “ongoing” and would continue for a fourth consecutive day on Wednesday.

The parties in Egypt — so far excluding Israel — have discussed a plan for a six-week truce, the exchange of dozens of hostages for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, and increased aid into Gaza.

Osama Hamdan, a Hamas official in Beirut, said the Islamist group would “not allow the path of negotiations to be open indefinitely”.

Mr. Biden warned Hamas to agree to a Gaza ceasefire by Ramadan, after his top diplomat, Antony Blinken, urged it to accept an “immediate ceasefire”.

“It’s in the hands of Hamas right now,” the U.S. president told reporters.

“There’s got to be a ceasefire because Ramadan — if we get into circumstances where this continues to Ramadan, Israel and Jerusalem could be very, very dangerous.”

Also read | U.N. envoy says ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe Hamas committed sexual violence on October 7

He did not elaborate, but the United States last week urged Israel to allow Muslims to worship at the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem during Ramadan.

The Israeli government said later that it would allow Muslim worshippers to access Al-Aqsa during Ramadan “in similar numbers to those in previous years”.

‘We want to eat and live’

As conditions in Gaza deteriorate, Israel has also faced increasingly sharp rebukes from Washington.

Vice President Kamala Harris had expressed “deep concern about the humanitarian conditions in Gaza” during talks on Monday with war cabinet member Benny Gantz, a centrist political rival of right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

American cargo planes airdropped more than 36,000 meals into Gaza Tuesday in a joint operation with Jordan, which said French and Egyptian planes also took part.

The United Nations has warned famine is “almost inevitable” in the Palestinian territory.

Israeli media reported, meanwhile, that the country’s negotiating team had so far boycotted the Cairo talks after Hamas had failed to provide it with a list of the living hostages.

Israel has said it believes 130 of the original 250 captives remain in Gaza, but that 31 have been killed.

Senior Hamas leader Bassem Naim told AFP on Monday that the group did not know “who among them are alive or dead, killed because of strikes or hunger”, and that the captives were being held by “numerous groups in multiple places”.

He said that, in order for all of them to be located, “a ceasefire is necessary”.

The war started with Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that resulted in about 1,160 deaths, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed 30,631 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry.

Fighting raged on in Gaza, with Hamas officials reporting dozens of Israeli air strikes near the European Hospital in Hamad City, in the main southern city of Khan Yunis.

Khan Yunis residents said decomposing bodies were lying in streets lined with destroyed homes and shops.

“We want to eat and live,” said Nader Abu Shanab, pointing to the rubble with blackened hands.

“Take a look at our homes. How am I to blame, a single, unarmed person without any income in this impoverished country?”

Israel-U.N. tensions

The U.N. World Health Organization said an aid mission to two hospitals in northern Gaza had found children dying of starvation.

“The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

On Tuesday, the WHO estimated at least 8,000 Gaza patients needed evacuating for treatment, which would relieve pressure on the few functioning hospitals.

Tensions between Israel and the United Nations flared on Monday, with Israel recalling its ambassador over the handling of allegations of sexual assault during the October attack.

Israel accused the U.N. of taking too long to respond to the claims, as the world body published a report that said there were “reasonable grounds to believe” rapes were committed and that hostages taken to Gaza had also faced sexual violence.

“In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed, and at least two incidents relate to the rape of women’s corpses,” the report said.

Shortly before the report’s release, Israel said it was recalling its ambassador Gilad Erdan over what it said was an attempt by the U.N. to “silence” reports of sexual violence by Hamas.

U.N. chief Antonio Guterres’s spokesman denied trying to suppress the report.

The war has sparked violence across the region, including near-daily exchanges of fire between Israeli forces and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement.

U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein, who urged a diplomatic solution during a Beirut visit Monday, met with Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv.

Mr. Gallant told Mr. Hochstein on Tuesday that Israel was committed to the diplomatic process but “emphasised that Hezbollah’s aggression is dragging the parties to a dangerous escalation”, his office said.

Palestinian Territories:

As Gaza’s hospital morgues overflow with victims killed in Israel’s bombardment triggered by a deadly Hamas attack, even an ice-cream truck has been used to hold corpses before their burial.

Israel has been pounding Gaza targets for days, seeking to wipe out the enclave’s rulers, Hamas, after its militants broke through the militarized border barrier on October 7 to kill more than 1,400 people in southern Israel.

Israel’s air strikes have claimed at least 2,750 lives in Gaza, where mortuaries with capacity only for dozens are filling up more quickly than relatives can claim them.

At the carpark of the hospital in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah, a white truck covered with posters of ice-cream sticks is now packed with corpses wrapped in white body bags.

Among them are multiple members of Talaat Abu Lashine’s family.

“Two shells fell on the house at dawn. Sixteen people were at home, including eight children who were sleeping peacefully,” he said.

In Gaza City, a little further north, where tens of thousands of inhabitants have heeded Israel’s warning to flee south ahead of an expected ground invasion, many bodies were simply left behind in the mortuaries.

“Given the large number of martyrs lying unclaimed in the morgue of al-Shifa hospital, the deterioration of the corpses, and the continued arrival” of dozens more, “a common grave has been prepared to bury around 100” of them, said Salama Maruf, head of the media bureau for the Hamas government that runs Gaza.

‘Lots of children’

Even body bags are now in short supply, said Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).

“Every story coming out of Gaza is about survival, despair, and loss,” he said.

“Sometimes we don’t even have time to write the names” of the dead because there are just too many of them, said Ihsan al-Natour, who works at a cemetery in southern Gaza’s Rafah.

“There are lots of children among the martyrs,” he said, adding that “we are burying three or four in each grave.”

Gaza’s ministry of religious affairs has recommended using common graves because of the large numbers of deaths and a shortage of burial space, as Muslim funeral rites also require burials to take place as quickly as possible.

Hamas, which has controlled the enclave since 2007, said Monday that 1,000 bodies could still be under rubble and warned of diseases spreading.

In Rafah, residents prepared new graves, placing bricks and tiles around mounds of freshly dug earth.

In one of them, three bodies of children were stacked on top of each other. There wasn’t enough space to lay them to rest separately.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)