Widespread Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip killed at least 60 people overnight and into Tuesday afternoon, Hamas-run health authorities said, as ground forces pressed forward with the first stages of the major “Gideon’s Chariots” offensive, through which Israel is seeking to “conquer” the war-torn Palestinian enclave.
Palestinian health authorities said a number of the strikes targeted civilian infrastructure, including a school-turned-shelter and several family homes.
The IDF, meanwhile, announced that in the past day, the air force had struck more than 100 “terror targets,” including a weapons depot, observation posts and buildings used by terror groups — including one used by Palestinian Islamic Jihad for storing weapons.
According to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, which does not differentiate between combatants and civilians, at least 22 people were killed on Tuesday when two strikes targeted a family home and a school sheltering displaced people in northern Gaza. It said that more than half of those killed were women and children, although the figures could not be independently verified.
The IDF told AFP that it “struck a Hamas terrorist who was operating from within a command and control center” within the school complex.
In footage from Gaza City, men, women and children could be seen sifting through the rubble of the Daraj neighborhood school where they had been sheltering, and where charred pieces of clothing and a red teddy bear lay among scattered belongings.
At the nearby Al-Ahli Hospital, men performed prayers over bodies wrapped in white shrouds, before carrying them to their graves.
“What is our fault? What is the fault of children? What is the fault of the women we found on the stairs with their hair and clothes torn and burned?” said Omar Ahel, who had been sheltering at the school. “By God, this is injustice.”
Elsewhere, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said that a strike in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah killed 13 people, and another at a gas station in the nearby Nuseirat refugee camp killed 15.
Two strikes in the southern city of Khan Younis were said by Nasser Hospital to have killed 10 people. Outside the hospital, Younis Abu Sahloul said his brother, sister-in-law and their four children were killed in a strike that hit the displaced persons camp without prior warning.
A spokesman for Gaza’s Hamas-run civil defense agency said dozens more people had been wounded.
According to Israeli officials, the fresh offensive launched over the weekend will see the IDF “conquer” Gaza, raze the vast majority of buildings and retain the territory for the foreseeable future; attack Hamas and prevent it from taking control of humanitarian aid supplies; and move Palestinians from the Strip’s north to its south.
Even as Israel’s conduct in Gaza has been drawing increasing criticism from the international community, a senior Hamas official angered Gazan residents after dismissing the high death toll as “material calculations,” in a recent interview.
Speaking from Qatar, where he is located, senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri claimed that the number of births in the Gaza Strip — around 50,000 since October 7, 2023, exceeded the number of casualties.
This, he said, demonstrated that the heavy losses did not reflect the broader picture of the conflict with Israel.
“The martyrs [killed in the war] — the wombs of Gaza’s women will give birth to twice as many,” he said. “This is the price that must be paid. If we thought in material terms, we would not be able to hold onto our land.”
The interview originally aired as a podcast in late March, but resurfaced in recent days amid the intensified Israeli strikes, and prompted a wave of backlash from Gazan civilians, who considered the comments deeply disrespectful to the tens of thousands killed.
Many were quick to point out that Abu Zuhri does not reside in Gaza and, as such, is disconnected from the impact of the war.
“A man outside the Strip says that everyone who was killed can simply be replaced. This is someone deluded beyond reason — he’s not one of us,” said one Gazan, in a recorded response.
The outrage also spilled out into the streets during an anti-Hamas demonstration in Khan Younis on Monday, where demonstrators could be heard chanting, “Oh Abu Zuhri, you disgrace, even the child wants to live.”
More than 500 people have been killed by Israeli strikes in the past eight days, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, which says more than 53,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the war so far.
The tolls cannot be verified and do not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas, including homes, hospitals, schools and mosques.
Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January, and another 1,600 terrorists inside the country during the October 7, 2023, onslaught, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.