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Israel launched airstrikes in the southern and central Gaza Strip on Monday, intensifying pressure on Hamas.
This follows a weekend attack aimed at the group’s leadership, resulting in numerous casualties among Palestinians sheltered in a designated “safe zone.”
Two days after the Israeli airstrikes devastated the densely populated area of Mawasi along the Mediterranean coast, leaving it scorched and strewn with burning vehicles and casualties, displaced survivors expressed uncertainty about their next steps.
“Those moments as the ground shook underneath my feet and the dust and sand rose to the sky and I saw dismembered bodies – were like nothing I have seen in my life,” said Aya Mohammad, 30, a market seller in Mawasi, reached by mobile text message.
“Where to go is what everybody asks, and no one has the answer.”
Mawasi, on the western outskirts of Khan Younis, has been sheltering hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled to the area after Israel declared it a safe zone.
Israel said its strike there on Saturday targeted Hamas commander Mohammed Deif, an architect of the Oct. 7 assault on Israeli towns and villages that triggered the Gaza war.
Palestinian officials say at least 90 people were killed on Saturday and many hundreds wounded.
Reuters journalists at the scene filmed the carnage, with residents carrying the wounded and dead amid flames and smoke.
Further south in Rafah, the main focus of Israel’s advance since May, residents reported renewed fighting on Monday.
Israeli forces in western and central parts of the city demolished several homes, residents said.
Medical officials said they recovered 10 bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in eastern areas of the city, some of which had already begun to decompose.
The military also intensified aerial and tank shelling in central Gaza in the al-Bureij and al-Maghazi historic refugee camps.
Health officials said five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a house in Maghazi camp.
The Israeli military said its air forces struck dozens of Palestinian targets across Gaza, killing many Hamas members.
It said forces killed members in Rafah and central Gaza, sometimes in close combat.
A statement from the Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad group, said its fighters were engaged in fierce battles in the Yabna camp in Rafah.
Talks
Saturday’s carnage in Mawasi, one of the deadliest Israeli strikes of the war, has overshadowed negotiations that both sides had previously described as the closest yet to a lasting cease-fire.
A senior Hamas official said on Sunday the group had not walked out of the talks despite the Mawasi strike.
Israel says another senior commander was killed in the strike but has not yet confirmed the fate of Deif.
Hamas officials have denied Deif was killed.
The Gazan Health Ministry said at least 38,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military offensive since Oct. 7.
The latest conflict began after a Hamas-led incursion on southern Israel on Oct. 7 which killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage to Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.
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