By Nidal al-Mughrabi Reuters
Share this story

CAIRO — Israeli forces pounded central Gaza anew on Sunday, a day after killing 274 Palestinians during a hostage rescue raid, and tanks advanced further into Rafah in an apparent bid to seal off part of the southern city, residents and Hamas media said.

Palestinians remained in shock over Saturday’s death toll, the worst over a 24-hour period of the Gaza war for months and including many women and children, Palestinian medics said.

ADVERTISING

In an update on Sunday, Gaza’s health ministry said 274 Palestinians were killed — up from 210 it reported on Saturday — and 698 were injured when Israeli special force commandos stormed into the densely populated Al-Nuseirat camp to rescue four hostages held since October by Hamas militants.

Sixty-four of the dead were children and 57 were women, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said on Sunday.

Israel’s military said a special forces officer was killed in exchanges of fire with militants emerging from cover in residential blocks, and that it knew of “under 100” Palestinians killed, though not how many of them were fighters or civilians.

Hamas’ armed wing said on Sunday three Israeli hostages, including one with U.S. citizenship, were killed during the raid, but provided no names. It released a video of what appeared to be corpses with censor bars obscuring their faces.

A Hamas assertion on Saturday that some hostages had died was rejected as “a blatant lie” by the Israeli military.

Gaza’s health ministry said another 798 Palestinians were injured in the Israeli raid, and one of them, 4-year-old Tawfiq Abu Youssef, was in critical condition when visited in hospital on Sunday by his father Raed.

The boy was first thought to have died before he moved his hand slightly while in the arms of a relative rushing him to hospital – captured in a video that went viral on social media.

“I had already dug his grave,” his father told Reuters, adding that most members of his extended family were among those killed in the raid.

More airstrikes in central Gaza

In central Gaza on Sunday, Israeli airstrikes on houses in the city of Deir Al-Balah and in the nearby Al-Bureij refugee camp killed three Palestinians in each location, while tanks shelled parts of Al-Nuseirat and Al-Maghazi camps, medics said.

The Israeli military said in a statement its forces were continuing operations east of Al-Bureij and Deir al-Balah, killing a number of Palestinian gunmen and destroying militant infrastructure.

Israeli tank forces have seized Gaza’s entire border strip with Egypt running through Rafah to the Mediterranean coast and invaded many districts of the city of 280,000 residents, prompting around one million displaced people who had been sheltering in Rafah to flee elsewhere.