The Israeli military on Friday reported three rockets hitting its territory from the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian rescuers said at least 16 people, including children, were killed in Israeli air strikes.
The rockets were the latest launched by operatives into the devastated Palestinian territory, with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warning this week that there would be more intense retaliatory attacks if they continued.
After more than 14 months of war between Israel and Palestinian Hamas activists in Gaza, such launches had become rare. They have intensified since late December as Israel continues a three-month-long major ground and air offensive in the north of the region.
One of Friday’s rockets “fell near the community of Nir Am” in Israel on the northeastern edge of Gaza, while the other fell in a deserted area, the army said.
Earlier in the day, it said another rocket fired from Gaza had set off sirens near Biri, opposite central Gaza.
There is no report of anyone being injured.
In Gaza, first responders said they recovered the bodies of 16 Palestinians, many of them children.
Gaza civil defense spokesman Mahmoud Bassal said the attacks hit Gaza City, the central Maghazi refugee camp and the southern city of Rafah.
“Friday was a harsh day for Gaza residents, especially in Gaza City, due to constant Israeli bombardment,” he told AFP.
He said many of the deaths occurred in attacks and shelling in northern and central Gaza and two deaths in the south.
Civil Defense said three children were killed by Israeli shelling in the Zeitun neighborhood of Gaza City, while an airstrike killed two people in the southern neighborhood of Rafah.
The Israeli military said in a statement that during the previous day, “the Israeli Air Force struck approximately 40 Hamas militants’ gathering points throughout Gaza”.
It added that some of the goals were “embedded in areas that previously served as schools”.
Hospital ‘pile of debris’
Bassal denied the army’s accusation and alleged that the army was “blocking food and drinking water from reaching dozens of medical staff, patients and wounded” at the Indonesian hospital in the city of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip.
He said his agency has been receiving distress calls from the hospital since Thursday, adding that the facility is now “just a pile of debris and walls. There is no hospital there.”
Late Friday, the military said it had not attacked the Indonesian hospital in the past or damaged any essential equipment.
It said there was “no need to evacuate the hospital” and that the military was coordinating with hospital authorities to allow humanitarian aid supplies to be delivered to the facility.
On Sunday, the United Nations aid team visited an Indonesian hospital.
“There is nothing around me but debris and destruction,” UN aid officer Jonathan Whittall said in a video released after visiting the hospital.
Israel’s military has regularly accused Hamas of using hospitals as command centers, which the operators deny.
A report published Tuesday by the UN human rights office said “insufficient information” has been provided to prove “vague” Israeli allegations of military use of hospitals.
The Israeli military has launched intense raids north of Gaza since October 6, saying it is an effort to prevent Hamas activists from regrouping there.
UN rights experts said on Monday that the “siege” of northern Gaza appears to be part of an effort to “permanently displace the local population as the beginning of the occupation of Gaza”.
Bassal estimated that 10,000 people remained in the northern towns of Jabaliya, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, from a population of between 150,000 and 200,000 before the war.
Earlier this week, Katz warned that Israel would escalate attacks in Gaza if rocket attacks did not stop and hostages still held in the area were not released.
The war in Gaza began with a Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year, resulting in the deaths of 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s response has so far killed at least 45,658 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, figures the United Nations considers credible.
The Israeli military also said on Friday it shot down a missile and a drone launched from Yemen, where Iran-backed rebels have attacked Israel since a November ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed group in Lebanon. Targeted attacks have been intensified.
Israel has also attacked Yemen, including targeting Sanaa’s international airport in late December.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
