Gaza rescuers say Israeli strikes kill at least 24

Gaza's civil defence agency said Thursday (1 May) that Israeli bombardment killed at least 24 people since midnight in the war-ravaged territory, which has been under an Israeli aid blockade for nearly two months.

Israel resumed its military campaign in the Gaza Strip on 18 March, after a two-month truce collapsed over disagreements between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, whose 2023 attack triggered the conflict.

Civil defence official Mohammed al-Mughayyir said the toll included eight people killed in an Israeli air strike on the Abu Sahlul family home in Khan Yunis refugee camp in the territory's south.

Four people were killed in an air strike east of Shaaf in Gaza City's Al-Tuffah neighbourhood, he told AFP.

At least 12 others were killed in seven separate attacks across the Palestinian territory, including one that hit a tent sheltering displaced people near the central city of Deir el-Balah, according to the agency.

"We came here and found all these houses destroyed, and children, women and young people all bombed to pieces," said Ahmed Abu Zarqa following a deadly strike in Khan Yunis.

"This is no way to live. Enough, we're tired, enough!

"We don't know what to do with our lives anymore. We'd rather die than live this kind of life."

AFP images showed residents digging through rubble in search of bodies, which were carried away on stretchers under blankets.

At Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, rescuers rushed a screaming, wounded child out of an ambulance.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Thursday that at least 2,326 people have been killed since Israel resumed strikes, bringing the overall death toll since the war broke out to 52,418.

The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

Militants also abducted 251 people, 58 of whom are still being held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel says its renewed military campaign aims to force Hamas to free the remaining captives.

Days before resuming its military campaign, Israel blocked all aid entering Gaza, with UN rights chief Volker Turk saying the territory was witnessing a "humanitarian catastrophe".

"Israel appears to be inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life increasingly incompatible with their continued existence as a group in Gaza," he said this week.