Israel launches new attacks on Gaza after a weekend attack killed dozens of people in the security zone

Cairo: Israel struck the southern and central Gaza Strip on Monday to increase pressure on Hamas, following an attack on the militant group’s leadership over the weekend that killed scores of Palestinians camping in a designated “safe zone.”

Two days after the Israeli attack turned a densely populated part of Mawasi near the Mediterranean coast into a charred wasteland filled with burning cars and mutilated corpses, displaced survivors said they did not know where to go next.

“Those moments when the ground shook beneath my feet, dust and sand rose into the sky and I saw dismembered bodies – I have never seen anything like that in my life,” said Aya Mohammad, 30, a market vendor in Mawasi who we reached by text message.

“Everyone is wondering where to go and no one has an answer.”

Mawasi, on the western outskirts of Khan Younis, is home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled to the area after Israel declared it a security zone. Israel said its attack there on Saturday was aimed at Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, who was responsible for the Oct. 7 assault on Israeli towns and villages that sparked the Gaza war.

Palestinian authorities say at least 90 people were killed and hundreds injured on Saturday. Reuters journalists on the scene filmed the carnage, with residents carrying the injured and dead through flames and smoke.

Further south in Rafah, the main focus of the Israeli advance since May, residents reported renewed fighting on Monday. Israeli forces in western and central parts of the city blew up several houses, they said. Medical officials said they had recovered 10 bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in eastern parts of the city, some of which had already begun to decompose.

The military also increased air and tank shelling of the historic Al-Bureij and Al-Maghazi refugee camps in central Gaza. Health officials said an Israeli airstrike on a house in the Maghazi camp killed five Palestinians.

The Israeli military said its air force struck dozens of Palestinian military targets across Gaza, killing scores of gunmen. It said the forces killed gunmen in Rafah and central Gaza, some in hand-to-hand combat.

A statement by the Al-Quds Brigade, the armed wing of the militant group Islamic Jihad, said its fighters were involved in heavy fighting in the Yabna camp in Rafah.

Saturday’s carnage in Mawasi, one of the deadliest Israeli attacks of the war, has overshadowed negotiations that both sides had previously described as the closest yet to a permanent ceasefire. A senior Hamas official said on Sunday the group had not abandoned talks despite the attack in Mawasi.

Israel says another senior commander was killed in the attack, but Deif’s fate has not been confirmed. Hamas officials have denied Deif’s death.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 38,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military offensive since October 7. While no distinction is made between combatants and non-combatants, officials say most of those killed during the war were civilians.

Israel says it has lost 326 soldiers in Gaza and says at least a third of the Palestinian fatalities were fighters.

The war began after a Hamas-led attack in Israel on October 7. According to Israeli authorities, militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took more than 250 hostage to Gaza.