At least 22 people have been killed after an Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza city of Rafah hit tents housing displaced people, Palestinian medics have said, hours after Hamas launched a barrage of rockets at Tel Aviv for the first time in months.
Footage from the scene of Sunday’s airstrike showed heavy destruction. Israel’s army confirmed the strike and said it hit a Hamas installation where senior members were located.
A spokesperson with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said the death toll was likely to rise as search and rescue efforts continued in Rafah’s Tal al-Sultan neighbourhood about 2km (1.2 miles) north-west of the city centre.
The society asserted that the location had been designated by Israel as a “humanitarian area” and it was not included in areas that Israel’s military ordered evacuated earlier this month.
The attack came hours after air raid sirens had sounded in the Mediterranean coastal city and across central Israel for the first time since January after what the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said was a salvo of eight rockets were fired from the Rafah area. The group’s ability to fire rockets and drones towards Israeli territory has steadily diminished over eight months of war.
Most of the rockets were intercepted, though there were reports that two women suffered minor injuries on their way to a shelter. Several flights from Ben Gurion airport were delayed or cancelled.
In a statement on its Telegram channel earlier on Sunday, Hamas’s military wing said the rockets were launched in response to “Zionist massacres against civilians”. At least five Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes on Rafah on Sunday morning, first responders said.
The far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, responded to the attack with a post on X that said: “Rafah! With full force!”
Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet, said: “Today’s barrage from Rafah is proof that the IDF must act wherever Hamas is.”
Also on Sunday, the IDF denied that an Israeli soldier had been abducted by Hamas, after unverified video footage published by the militant group on Saturday appeared to show Palestinian fighters dragging an unconscious soldier through a tunnel.
Israel has pressed ahead with an offensive on the southernmost part of the strip despite an order from the UN’s top court on Friday to halt the assault, which it said was worsening an already “disastrous” humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territory.
Nearly nine months into the new conflict, Rafah, on the Egyptian border, is the only part of the Gaza Strip yet to face ground fighting, and more than half of the territory’s 2.3 million population had sought shelter there before the offensive. Israel has repeatedly said a ground operation in Rafah, where it believes Hamas’s leadership and four battalions of fighters are camped out using Israeli hostages as human shields, is necessary to achieve “total victory” over the group.
About 1 million people have been forced to flee since Israel began moving into the southern and eastern edges of the city earlier this month. Desperately needed aid deliveries have ground to a halt, as the Rafah border crossing, and the nearby Kerem Shalom, a goods crossing connecting Gaza with Israel, are in effect blocked by the fierce fighting. About 200 trucks were supposed to enter Gaza through Kerem Shalom on Sunday after an agreement was reached with Egypt, although it remained unclear whether relief agencies would be able to reach it.
Residents in Jabaliya in northern Gaza also reported ground fighting earlier on Sunday. In recent months, Hamas has been able to regroup and launch attacks across northern and central areas of the territory that are supposedly under Israeli control.
Israel’s long-threatened plan to attack the border town had drawn intense opposition from even the country’s staunchest allies, such as the US, which said the overcrowded conditions in Rafah could lead to thousands of civilian casualties. However, Washington has noticeably blurred its red lines since the operation began.
About 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in Hamas’s surprise assault on 7 October, with a further 250 taken hostage. Almost 36,000 people have been killed in the ensuing war in Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry, which does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths.
Several attempts at brokering a new truce, after a week-long cessation of hostilities in November, have foundered. The last round of talks, mediated by the US, Egypt and Qatar, quickly drew to a stalemate after Israel launched its attack on Rafah.
US intelligence officials met Israeli and Qatari delegations in Paris on Friday in an attempt to get negotiations back on track, but Hamas downplayed reports of tentative progress, telling Reuters on Sunday that the group had not received anything from the mediators on new dates for the resumption of talks, as Israeli media had reported.