‘Massacre’: 50 killed after Israel bombs building in Gaza’s Beit Lahiya

Civil defence spokesman says rescue workers are unable to reach the site of the attack due to the Israeli siege.At least 50 Palestinians killed as Israel bombs Gaza residential building

At least 50 people, a third of them children, have been killed in an Israeli strike in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahiya city, authorities said, as deadly bombardments hit the central and southern parts of the besieged Palestinian territory.

Gaza’s Government Media Office on Sunday said Israeli forces struck a multistorey residential building housing six forcibly displaced Palestinian families in Beit Lahiya.

The Ministry of Health’s Director-General Munir al-Bursh told Al Jazeera that almost 30 percent of the victims of the Beit Lahiya “massacre” were children. He said dozens of others were wounded and many more are feared trapped under the rubble.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza, told Al Jazeera that emergency workers were unable to reach the site of the attack due to the more than 40-day-old Israeli siege of northern Gaza.

With reports of several people trapped under the rubble, the death toll is likely to rise in the coming hours.

There was no immediate comment from Israel, which has been conducting genocide in the Palestinian territory for more than a year.

It was not the first time Israel had hit Beit Lahiya, resulting in mass casualties. Last month, its forces bombed the Abu Nasr family residence in the city, killing at least 93 people.

On Saturday, Israel also attacked the United Nations-run Abu Assi school in the Shati refugee camp, killing 10 Palestinians and injuring 20 others, including women and children.

Last month, the Israeli army sent tanks into Beit Lahiya and the nearby towns of Beit Hanoon and Jabalia, the largest of the Gaza Strip’s eight historic refugee camps, in what it said was a campaign to fight Hamas.

Israel claimed the operation killed hundreds of fighters in those three areas. But Palestinian authorities said the attacks killed mostly women, children and the elderly, while also leaving tens of thousands starving to death with no access to food, water and medical help.

Earlier on Sunday, separate Israeli air raids killed at least 17 people in the Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps in central Gaza.

Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary, reporting from Deir el-Balah, said “explosions did not stop” in central parts of the Strip throughout Sunday morning.

“At Al-Aqsa Hospital, there are 17 killed Palestinians in the morgue. People are waiting to bury the dead, but there is a shortage of coffins across the Gaza Strip,” she said.

“We saw mothers crying, bidding farewells to their loved ones,” Khoudary said, adding that many of those killed, including four children, were members of the same family.

In southern Gaza’s Rafah city, an Israeli bombing killed five Palestinians, according to our colleagues from Al Jazeera Arabic.

The Health Ministry said on Sunday at least 43,846 Palestinians have been confirmed killed in Israeli attacks since October 7, 2023.

Meanwhile, Palestine’s Transport Minister Tariq Zourob told private sector representatives during a meeting at the Palestinian embassy in Cairo that, as a result of Israeli attacks, the damage to transport and communication infrastructure across the enclave had reached $4.8bn.

At least 300,000 tonnes of “solid waste” are reportedly on the roads across the Gaza Strip, Zourob was quoted as saying by the Palestinian news agency Wafa on Sunday.