JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli air strikes on the Bureij refugee camp and the town of Jabalia in the central and northern Gaza Strip killed at least 17 Palestinians on Wednesday, the official Palestinian News Agency (Wafa) reported.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment although its Arabic spokesman had earlier warned Bureij residents, in a post on the X website, to evacuate before an imminent strike against militants launching rockets from the area.
It also said overnight that it had killed Abd al-Hadi Sabah, a Hamas operative who helped lead the infiltration of Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Islamist group's October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel.
The instructions to evacuate the Bureij camp caused a new wave of displacement, although it was not immediately clear how many people were affected.
Israel says its nearly three-month-long campaign in northern Gaza aims to prevent Hamas activists from regrouping. The army says its instructions to civilians to evacuate are aimed at keeping them out of harm's way.
Palestinian and UN officials say there is no safe place in Gaza and that evacuations are worsening humanitarian conditions for residents.
According to the Palestinian Civil Defense, heavy rains have flooded more than 1,500 tents housing displaced people across Gaza over the past two days, leaving people exposed to the cold, and their property damaged.
Hundreds of other tents were exposed to less severe flooding, leaving the displaced unable to use them.
Much of the area surrounding the northern towns of Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and Beit Lahia has been depopulated and destroyed, raising speculation that Israel intends to keep the area as a closed buffer zone after the fighting in Gaza ends.
Wafa said that the army blew up residential complexes in Beit Lahia and in and around Jabalia, while tanks bombed parts of Gaza City and the Bureij camp.
The Israeli campaign in Gaza has killed more than 45,500 Palestinians, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave. Most of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been displaced and much of the small coastal enclave has been reduced to rubble.
Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killed 1,200 people, with 251 others taken hostage in Gaza, according to Israeli statistics.
