35 killed as Israeli strikes hit Gaza refugee camps

At least 35 people were killed in Nuseirat and Maghazi refugee camps following Israeli bombings in central Gaza yesterday, as the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said an aid convoy came under fire by the Israeli military in the enclave.

“Israeli soldiers fired at an aid convoy as it returned from northern Gaza along a route designated by the Israeli army — our international convoy leader and his team were not injured but one vehicle sustained damage,” UNRWA’s director in Gaza, Tom White, wrote on X.

Earlier yesterday, the UN humanitarian chief, Martin Griffiths, wrote a post on X describing what he called “an impossible situation for the people of Gaza, and for those trying to help them”.

Griffiths said that aid convoys had been shot at, without elaborating. “You think getting aid into Gaza is easy? Think again,” he said.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of newly displaced Gazans huddled under tarpaulins yesterday in the centre of the enclave after fleeing the latest offensive by Israeli tanks, while warplanes targeted the south, flattening homes and burying families as they slept.

In the south of the strip in Rafah, Reuters journalists at the scene of one air strike that obliterated a building saw the head of a buried toddler sticking out of the rubble.

• 20 killed as residential building hit in Gaza
• Gaza death toll rises to 21,507
• Hamas officials due in Cairo for truce talks

Neighbour Sanad Abu Tabet said the two-storey house had been crowded with displaced people. A separate Israeli attack hit a residential building near the Kuwaiti hospital in southern Gaza, killing at least 20.

Gaza health authorities said 187 more Palestinians were confirmed killed in Israeli strikes in the past 24 hours, raising the toll to 21,507 — about 1 percent of Gaza’s population — with thousands more bodies feared unrecovered in the ruins.

The United Nations says many thousands more may die from severe shortages of food, medicine, clean water and adequate shelter.

A Hamas delegation was due in Cairo yesterday to look at an Egyptian plan for a ceasefire that would end the war in Gaza, a Hamas official said.

The plan was put last week to officials of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which is also battling Israeli forces in the territory.

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian, medics said, after military officials alleged he carried out a car ramming.

The army said soldiers “neutralised” the driver who rammed the car into people near a military post south of the city of Hebron.

The Magen David Adom paramedic service said that it treated one person in moderate condition and three others who were lightly wounded.

The Palestinian health ministry named the alleged assailant shot by Israeli forces as Amro Abu Hussein.

More than 520 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank this year by Israeli security forces and settlers, according to a health ministry toll, at least 314 of them since Israel’s October 7 offensive in Gaza.