The bodies were recovered from under bombed buildings, most of them women and children, the civil defense in Gaza said.
Thirty bodies, most of them women and children, were recovered from among the ruins of bombed buildings in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, the civil defense unit there told Al Jazeera.
There were many casualties after an Israeli airstrike late Sunday evening on a residential building in the largest of eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, according to Gaza’s Interior Ministry.
At least 27 people were also injured and hospitals said they were struggling to treat the wounded.
“We are suffering from an acute shortage of medicines and medical equipment,” the director of the Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza told Al Jazeera.
Israel has been bombing the Gaza Strip for more than two weeks in response to a Hamas incursion into Israeli soil on October 7. The attack on the camp comes as the death toll in Gaza has risen to 4,651 and the number of injured to 14,245. according to the health ministry of the besieged enclave.
“We will never be safe”
The densely populated Jabalia camp is also home to three schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
Some of these schools have been converted into shelters for hundreds of displaced families.
There have also been previous Israeli bombings of the camp. Amnesty International reports that on October 9, Israeli airstrikes hit a market in the camp, one of the busiest areas in Gaza, although the number of people killed in the strikes is not yet known.
A resident of the camp who survived them says the events of the last two weeks have changed everything.
“For me,” Asmaa Tayeh, a young writer, told Al Jazeera, “I believe that even after the war ends, we will never be safe.” In fact, as long as Palestine is occupied and its people are terrorized, I will never feel free. “
The first aid shipments arrived in Gaza on Saturday and Sunday, but aid groups say it is only a fraction of what is needed as thousands remain trapped.
Before October 7, several hundred aid trucks arrived in Gaza every day.