Dozens Palestinians were killed or injured today by an Israeli strike on a high-rise residential building in Beit Lachiain the northern Gaza Strip, medics said, with the Palestinian civil protection agency in the enclave reporting 26 dead, including women and children, and at least 59 missing.

As a result of this overnight strike, 26 bodies were recovered from the building, “among them children and women”, and at least 59 people are still trapped under the rubble, the official told AFP. Mahmoud Basalrepresentative of civil protection.

Images broadcast by an AFP photographer show the completely leveled building reduced to a pile of rubble which people are trying to clear with their bare hands.

Lifeless bodies in blankets are also seen being carted away by a donkey.

Israeli forces launched a large-scale ground operation in the northern Gaza Strip on October 6 in what they say is a bid to prevent militants from the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas from regrouping. The operation started in Jabalia and then expanded to Beit Lahia.

In a statement, Hamas condemned a “genocide” that is part of the “genocidal war (…) against unarmed civilians”.

Elsewhere in the Gaza Strip, the civil protection service said 20 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes.

Palestinian civil protection said about 70 people lived in the building, while the Hamas government put the death toll at 72, noting that the strike targeted a building where members of six families lived, with Israel not commenting on the strike. .

At the beginning of last month, the Israeli army launched large-scale ground operations in the northern part of the Palestinian enclave and mainly in Beit Lachia, the Beit Hanun and the Jabaliathe largest of the Gaza Strip’s eight historic refugee camps, with the goal, he says, of preventing Hamas fighters from regrouping and launching attacks.

Israeli forces have since announced that they have killed hundreds of “terrorists”, with residents of northern Gaza complaining that they are completely cut off from the rest of the Palestinian enclave.

Israeli military operations in northern Gaza and the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the area have raised concerns that Israel is seeking to create a buffer zone there and possibly preparing the return of Jewish settlers. Israel’s military has denied that this is its pursuit.

Earlier today an Israeli airstrike on a house killed at least 10 people in the camp Boureysin the central part of the Gaza Strip, civil protection spokesman Mahmoud Basal said.

At least one woman was also killed and ten other people were injured in a strike against another house in the camp, he added.

In addition, four people – “three women and a child” – were killed in a night strike against a house in the neighboring camp Nuseirathe clarified.

In Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, five people were killed and 11 wounded by “a rocket fired by an Israeli drone this morning” in the eastern part of the city, explained the Mahmoud Basal.

According to the Hamas Health Ministry, at least 43,799 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, most of them women and children.