Dozens of people have been killed in Israeli airstrikes in northern Gaza and more were trapped under debris, according to emergency rescue workers in the territory, as a weekslong Israeli offensive continued to isolate the area.
Palestinian Civil Defense in Gaza, an emergency response group, said it believed that more than 75 people had been killed in strikes in Beit Lahia, a farming town north of Gaza City, although it said it had been unable to reach the site because of an Israeli blockade. Civil Defense does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its death tolls, but it said that families were among the dead.
“Entire families were wiped out in northern Gaza and we don’t know anything about them,” the group said in a statement on Friday night. “And there are survivors who remain under the rubble for a long time, and there is no civil defense to rescue them.”
Rescue workers have been unable to operate in northern Gaza since an Israeli offensive began almost two months ago. Internet and phone service to the area has also been unreliable in recent days, leaving both rescue workers and the families of those killed and missing with few ways to obtain reliable information.
The Israeli military dismissed reports of airstrikes in Beit Lahia as “false Hamas propaganda” on Saturday, but said it was continuing its “counterterrorism activity against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.”
The military “operates following precise and credible intelligence against Hamas terrorists and terror targets, not against the civilians in Gaza,” the military said in a statement. “We emphasize that the area in question is an active war zone.”
As a tenuous cease-fire appears to largely hold in Lebanon, any pause in the war in Gaza feels distant. For months, cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian armed group that set off the war with its deadly October 2023 attack on Israel, have stalled as Israeli airstrikes and shelling have continued to pound the enclave.
Israel began a major military offensive in northern Gaza in early October to combat what its military describes as a Hamas resurgence in the area. Local residents and aid groups say the humanitarian effect of the operation has been severe.
At the start of the offensive, the United Nations estimated that 400,000 people were trapped in the combat zone, and tens of thousands have fled the area since then. The fighting has also brought the flow of humanitarian aid and commerce in the north to a near standstill, leaving the civilian population with little access to food, water, medicine and other essentials.
Momen Ahmed, 27, said he spent hours fruitlessly calling his relatives and neighbors in Beit Lahia when he heard that there had been strikes nearby. “No internet or communications are there,” he said.
Finally Mr. Ahmed reached a neighbor, who he said told him that the family house had “been flattened and everyone who was inside the building when the strike took place must have been killed.”
In Lebanon, the Israeli military said on Saturday that it had struck “military infrastructure” near the border crossing with Syria that was “actively being used” by Hezbollah to violate the cease-fire agreement, even as the uneasy deal appeared to hold. Hezbollah did not immediately comment on the accusation.
The military said the site was being used by Hezbollah to transport weapons to Lebanon from Syria. Israel’s military has struck at least two other sites that it described as Hezbollah infrastructure since the cease-fire went into effect early on Wednesday.
The latest Israeli strike came shortly after the Israeli military said it had also been “removing” people it called suspects from several areas of southern Lebanon. But the military declined to answer questions about how many militants had been removed, where they had been removed from, and where Israeli forces had taken them to.
Under the cease-fire agreement, Israeli forces will gradually withdraw from southern Lebanon over 60 days.
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