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At least 40 Palestinians were killed and 60 wounded in what rescue workers have called one of the most horrific attacks of the war in Gaza.
The overnight strike hit displaced civilians near a British field hospital at the entrance to Al Mawasi, according to the official Wafa news agency. While the area has been designated for months by the Israeli army as a “safe zone”, it has come under repeated attack.
Forty people were found dead within the first three hours of the rescue operation, Wafa reported, with Gaza's civil defence describing the incident as “one of the most horrific massacres since the beginning of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip”.
“Entire families have disappeared into the sand,” rescue workers said. They warned that they lack adequate equipment for the scale of the operation.
Survivors and rescue workers have described victims thrown 30 metres from their beds, buried in the sand and killed as they slept in the sprawling tent encampment, while others likened the attack to an earthquake.
Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are staying in tents in Al Mawasi after being evacuated from other areas of Gaza. Israel said militants were operating from a disguised command centre in the area, but Hamas said this was a “clear lie”.
The army later said it had targeted Samer Abu Daqa, head of the Hamas aerial unit, Osama Tabesh, head of the observation and targets unit in Hamas intelligence, and senior militant Iman Mahbouh, all of whom it claimed were "directly involved" in the October 7 attack which started the war.
'No warning'
The army said it had used precise weapons to reduce civilian harm, while Gaza's civil defence said no warning was given before the strike.
Five missiles were used in the attack, destroying tents and blasting nine-metre deep holes into the sand, according to civil defence teams, who dug throughout the night for survivors.
Al Mawasi is in a “state of chaos”, Wafa reported, with power to the area cut, fires and Israeli reconnaissance planes flying overhead. The area has suffered some of the deadliest attacks on Gaza since the war began.
Only 19 people killed in the strike have been formally identified, the Gaza health ministry said in its daily update on Tuesday afternoon.
In July, at least 90 people were killed in a strike on Al Mawasi, intended to kill Hamas commander Mohammed Deif. The militant group said he survived the attack.
The war in Gaza began on October 7, when Hamas killed about 1,200 people and abducted about 240 during attacks on southern Israeli communities.
More than 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the outbreak of war, according to the enclave's health ministry.
School strikes have been particularly deadly, with more than 100 people killed during an August strike on Al Tabaeen school as displaced people gathered for dawn prayers inside the complex.
In February, about 112 people were killed and at least 700 wounded in what was dubbed the “flour massacre” in northern Gaza, when Israeli troops were reported to have opened fire on people waiting for food aid.
Israel's military campaign in Gaza has been described by war monitors as among the deadliest for civilians in modern warfare, while UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said the scale of suffering in the Palestinian enclave is the worst he has seen in office.
“The level of suffering we are witnessing in Gaza is unprecedented in my mandate as Secretary General of the United Nations. I’ve never seen such a level of death and destruction as we are seeing in Gaza in the last few months,” Mr Guterres said on Monday.
Elsewhere in Gaza, at least 15 people were killed in strikes on Gaza city on Monday night and Tuesday morning, including five killed by Israeli shelling on a felafel stand in the east of the city.
Shelling was also reported at Nuseirat refugee camp in northern Gaza.
The Palestinian foreign ministry condemned the Al Mawasi strike as a "massacre," with statements also issued by Turkey's foreign ministry and the EU's top diplomat Josep Borrell.
“An immediate ceasefire is the only way to protect Palestinian civilians and create a suitable environment for achieving a prisoner exchange deal,” said he said in Ramallah.
International-led efforts to end the war have so far failed to bring about any meaningful truce in Gaza since a temporary ceasefire in November, with short-term pauses for polio vaccinations only implemented in specific areas.
As the death toll continued to mount on Tuesday, Israel's Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said a ceasefire deal would give Israel a "strategic opportunity" to "change the security situation on all fronts."
The prospect of any deal remains distant - with PM Benjamin Netanyahu insistent on keeping troops in Gaza's border strip with Egypt, while Hamas has demanded an Israeli withdrawal from the corridor.
Vaccine campaign in doubt
Gaza city and the north of the enclave are the focus of the third phase of a UN-led campaign to vaccinate children against polio. However, the effort may be stalled after staff were detained at an Israeli checkpoint on Monday.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN's agency for Palestinian refugees, said a convoy was detained at gunpoint for more than eight hours near the Wadi Gaza checkpoint as it travelled north to continue the vaccination campaign.
“We are not able to confirm whether the polio campaign will take place tomorrow in northern Gaza,” Mr Lazzarini said in a social media post.
“UN Staff must be allowed to undertake their duties in safety and be protected at all times in accordance with international humanitarian law. Gaza is no different.”
The UN hopes to vaccinate at least 640,000 children under 10 in Gaza, including 150,000 children in northern areas, after polio re-emerged in the territory last month for the first time in 25 years.
The first case, a 10-month-old baby, was paralysed by the disease.
While more than 446,000 children were vaccinated in the first two phases of the campaign, at least 90 per cent of children need to be inoculated in order to prevent an outbreak.