Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 65 people in Gaza in the past 24 hours, including women, children and two journalists, the Palestinian health authority said on Monday, nearly a week after Israel broke its ceasefire with Hamas.
Palestinians in Gaza have again been fleeing for their lives after Israel launched its new offensive in the territory, which started on Tuesday last week with a wave of airstrikes that killed about 700 people, mostly civilians, ending two months of relative calm, according to the Palestinian health ministry in the territory run by Hamas.
Hossam Shabat, a journalist for the Al Jazeera Mubasher channel, was killed in northern Gaza on Monday. Witnesses told the network that his car was targeted in the eastern part of Beit Lahiya.
Earlier in the day, Mohammad Mansour, a reporter who worked for Palestine Today, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.
According to witnesses, Mansour was targeted “in his house alongside his wife and his son” without any prior warning.
There was no immediate comment by the Israel Defense Forces.
At least 208 journalists and media workers have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 2023, according to the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate.
Palestinian medics say an Israeli strike hit a school where displaced people were sheltering in the Gaza Strip on Monday, killing at least four people, including a child.
Another 18 people were wounded in Monday’s strike in the built-up Nuseirat refugee camp, according to al-Awda hospital, which received the casualties. Three other hospitals had earlier reported 25 deaths from Israeli strikes overnight and into Monday.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which says it only targets militants and tries to avoid harming civilians.
In a separate Israeli airstrike on Sunday night, the Nasser hospital, the largest medical facility in southern Gaza, was hit, killing five people, including a Hamas political leader.
The Israeli military said its attack followed extensive intelligence and used precise munitions to minimise harm at the site.
Hamas confirmed that a member of its political office, Ismail Barhoum, had been killed. Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, confirmed the target was Barhoum.
Hamas’s al-Aqsa TV said Barhoum was being treated at the hospital for wounds sustained in a previous attack. Another Hamas leader, Salah al-Bardawil, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Khan Younis on Sunday. Both Bardawil and Barhoum were members of the 19-member political office, the group’s decision-making body, 11 of whom have been killed since the start of the war in late 2023, according to Hamas sources.
Sunday’s strike on Nasser hospital was the second on a health facility in Gaza in three days. On Friday, Israel blew up central Gaza’s Turkish-Palestinian Friendship hospital, Gaza’s only specialised cancer treatment hospital, which had already been severely damaged by Israeli airstrikes since October 2023.
Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a volunteer in a Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) team working at Nasser hospital, said medics in the emergency department were awaiting casualties when a massive blast shook the building.
“Everybody ran out to see what happened until one of my colleagues screamed ‘They hit surgery,’ Haj-Hassan said in a voice message. “There was so much smoke and fire. I ran across to the building next door, where the paediatric ICU is, just to grab my portable ultrasounds and a few things, knowing that we’d be receiving casualties.
“As I walked out, I could see the second floor of the building on fire.”
Steve Cutts, the chief executive of MAP, said the attack “demonstrates once again that nowhere is safe in Gaza”.
Cutts said a 16-year-old boy recovering from earlier surgery was also killed and at least eight people, including medical staff, were injured.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said its office in the southern Gaza Strip was damaged by an explosive projectile on Monday, adding that no staff were wounded.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said the aim of the war was to destroy Hamas as a military and governing entity. The ambition of the new campaign was to force the group to give up the remaining hostages, he said last week.
On Monday, Hamas’s armed wing released a video showing two Israeli hostages held in Gaza since the Palestinian militants’ attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.
The footage, which lasts a little over three minutes and whose exact recording date could not be verified, shows two men sitting on the floor speaking in Hebrew to a hostage who has since been released, asking him to recount his experiences in captivity in order to speed up their release.
Meanwhile, officials say Egypt has introduced a new proposal to try to get the Gaza ceasefire back on track.
According to the plan, Hamas would release five living hostages, including an American-Israeli, in return for Israel allowing humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and a weeks-long pause in the fighting, an Egyptian official said Monday. Israel would also release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
A Hamas official said the group had “responded positively” to the proposal, without elaborating.
The Gaza Health Ministry said at least 50,082 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and another 113,408 have been wounded, since the beginning of the war, triggered by an attack by Hamas militants in Israel in October 2023 in which they killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages.
