Gaza's civil defense agency said an Israeli strike on a residential building in Gaza City killed at least 23 people Wednesday, most of them children or women, as the military said it targeted a "senior Hamas" fighter.
The latest strike comes weeks into a renewed offensive by Israel's military on the war-battered territory, which has displaced hundreds of thousands, while an aid blockade has revived the specter of famine for its 2.4 million people.
The strike took place in the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, the agency's spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP.
"The death toll from the Shujaiya massacre has risen to 23 martyrs, including eight children and eight women," he said, adding that more than 60 people were wounded.
"There are still people trapped under the rubble."
Ayub Salim, a 26-year-old Shujaiya resident, told AFP he witnessed the strike on the four-storey block.
He said the area was hit with "multiple missiles" and was "overcrowded with tents, displaced people and homes".
"Shrapnel flew in all directions," he said, speaking of "a terrifying and indescribable scene".
"Dust and massive destruction filled the entire place, we couldn't see anything, just the screams and panic of the people".
Salim said the dead were "torn to pieces".
"Even now, emergency crews are still transporting the dead and the injured. It is truly a horrific massacre," he said.
A crew from the Gaza civil defense agency rushed to the scene, only to find several people trapped under the rubble, a rescuer said.
"This house was home to many people who believed they were safe. It was blown up over their heads," Ibrahim Abu al-Rish told AFP while men worked hard to clear out rubble behind him.
He added that the strike hit while many children were playing inside.
"The house was directly bombed, and the entire residential area was destroyed," he said.
"We pulled out the remains of women and children. There are still people buried under the rubble."
First responders and neighbors worked to break through the concrete floor of an entire storey that collapsed in the strike and trapped residents.
Taking turns swinging a sledgehammer through the thick, hard surface, they eventually broke a hole through which the bodies of children were extracted and taken away wrapped in dusty blankets.
- 'Bloody massacre' -
When asked by AFP about the strike, the Israeli military said it "struck a senior Hamas terrorist who was responsible for planning and executing terrorist attacks" from the area.
It did not give the target's name and renewed its claim that the group uses "human shields", which Hamas denies.
Hamas condemned the strike as one of the "most heinous acts of genocide."
"The terrorist Zionist occupation army has committed a bloody massacre by bombing a densely populated residential area filled with civilians and displaced people," the group said in a statement.
"These ongoing massacres against our defenseless people -- with full support from the American administration, which is complicit in the aggression -- represent a stain on the conscience of the international community."
The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority's foreign ministry condemned the strike as a "heinous massacre".
"The ministry considers it an official Israeli attempt to systematically kill our people en masse and destroy the very foundations of their existence in the Gaza Strip, thus forcing them to emigrate," it said in a statement.
Israel resumed intense strikes on the Gaza Strip on March 18, ending a two-month ceasefire with Hamas. Efforts to restore the truce have so far failed.
The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said on Wednesday that at least 1,482 Palestinians have been killed in the renewed Israeli operations, taking the overall death toll since the start of the war to 50,846.
Hamas's October 2023 attack that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Hossam Badran, a member of Hamas's political bureau, told AFP on Tuesday that it was "necessary to reach a ceasefire" in Gaza.
He added that "communication with the mediators is still ongoing" but that "so far, there are no new proposals".
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that new negotiations were in the works aimed at getting more hostages released from captivity in Gaza.
Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas's attack on Israel, 58 are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
