Officials say a number of victims still to be recovered from Gaza tent camp for displaced Palestinians.
At least 19 people have been killed and many wounded in an Israeli strike on a designated “safe zone” in southern Gaza, according to officials.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said the bodies of the victims recovered so far had arrived in hospitals after the missile attack on a tent camp in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis, where Palestinians were sheltering, early on Tuesday. Israeli attacks have frequently hit areas where its military had previously directed civilians seeking safety.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Government Media Office in Gaza, as well as civil defence authorities, had reported that at least 40 people had been killed and more than 60 were injured in the attack, with many also missing.
“A number of victims are still under the rubble, under the sand, and on the roads, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them and retrieve them, and they have not reached hospitals yet,” the health ministry statement noted, while reporting the lower death toll.
The Israeli military had argued with the original figures reported, and stated that the attack, which witnesses said involved at least four missile strikes, targeted a Hamas command centre. The Palestinian armed group branded that a “blatant lie”.
Al-Mawasi has been crowded with Palestinians sleeping in tents since the Israeli army designated the coastal area a “safe zone” during its ground invasions of Khan Younis and nearby Rafah.
Rescuers searching for survivors said they found craters up to nine metres (30 feet) deep at the tent camp, Al Jazeera Arabic reported, quoting local sources.
Witnesses described chaotic scenes in the area, with fires burning while Israeli reconnaissance planes circled overhead.
“The people were buried in the sand,” one witness, Attaf al-Shaar, told The Associated Press. “They were retrieved as body parts.”
“Dozens are still missing and the civil defence have been digging with their bare hands to get the people out,” reported Al Jazeera’s Mansour Shouman.
‘Massacre’
A spokesperson for Gaza’s civil defence said the initial assessment of the scene suggested the attack was “one of the most heinous massacres in this frenzied war”.
The spokesperson said ambulance and civil defence teams were having difficulty retrieving the bodies of people killed in the attack.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the attack, with its executive director, Nihad Awad, accusing Israel’s government of massacring “Palestinians as if they were sheep for the slaughter, not human beings deserving life and freedom”.
Israeli authorities said the attack struck “significant Hamas terrorists” who had been operating a command and control centre embedded inside the humanitarian zone in Khan Younis.
“Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance, and additional means,” the Israeli foreign ministry said in a statement posted on X.
Hamas, the Palestinian group that governs Gaza, denied that its fighters were in the targeted area and accused Israeli authorities of perpetuating lies to justify their “ugly crimes”.
“The resistance has denied several times that any of its members exist within civilian gatherings or using these places for military purposes,” Hamas said in a statement.