An Israeli airstrike near a market in Gaza City killed nearly two dozen Palestinians on Wednesday, according to the Palestinian Civil Defense rescue service.
The civil defense said six women and nine children were among at least 22 dead in the attack near Firas Market on the eastern side of the city. The Wafa news agency, which is linked to the Palestinian Authority administration in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said all of those killed were seeking shelter in a warehouse that was hit by the strike.
An Israeli military statement said the strike had hit “two Hamas terrorists in the northern Gaza Strip,” without providing further details about who they were. It went on to say the number of casualties reported “does not align with the information” obtained by the Israeli military. But it did not say how many people it believed had been killed in the strike.
Israel has said it launched the ground invasion of Gaza City last week to root out the Palestinian militant group Hamas from one of its last strongholds. Hamas led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that ignited the Gaza war. The Israeli military has said that its operations in Gaza target militants and the infrastructure they use to mount attacks, such as weapons caches or tunnels, and that those targets are often located in civilian areas.
Israel has come under growing international pressure recently for escalating the war with the ground invasion of Gaza City, the territory’s largest urban center. The operation has already displaced hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have been displaced before in the war, and deepened a humanitarian catastrophe across the Gaza Strip.
In the past few days, almost a dozen countries have expressed their frustration with the conflict by formally recognizing a Palestinian state, angering Israeli officials.
Before launching the ground invasion of Gaza City, the Israeli military ordered the entire population — hundreds of thousands of people — to evacuate. It instructed them to go to what it described as a humanitarian zone in southern Gaza.
But many civilians remained in the city, with some saying they could not afford to leave and others skeptical that anywhere in Gaza was safe to flee to.
Wafa reported that in addition to the deaths in the warehouse, another five people were killed in strikes on Wednesday in different parts of Gaza City, four women and a man.
The civil defense said it had also retrieved four bodies from the rubble of a building that had been hit by another strike in Nuseirat in central Gaza, roughly seven miles south of Gaza City. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment about the strike in Nuseirat.
Nedal Abu Sherbi, 37, a resident of Gaza City, said he could not afford to leave. But even if he could, he could not imagine fleeing again.
Earlier in the war, he said, he left the city to seek shelter in the south but found it to be “a very humiliating experience.”
“If I am going to suffer anyway, then I am staying here,” said Mr. Abu Sherbi, a freelance journalist. He is now sheltering in a school in Rimal, a once upscale neighborhood, after his home was destroyed.
He said Israeli troops appeared to be “in full control” of many neighborhoods, but not in the area where he was staying. But it was impossible to walk more than a few blocks in any direction from his shelter, he said.
“Things in Rimal are relatively better than in other areas, but strikes still take place all the time,” he said. “We cannot sleep through the night because of the constant strikes.”
Before the evacuation order, the United Nations said nearly one million people were living in Gaza City, about half of the territory’s total population. Israeli officials have said estimated that 640,000 people have fled the city since the evacuation orders were given.
Israel has destroyed large areas of the city in recent months. Even before the ground operation began last week, the Israeli military had said it was in control of 40 percent of the city, primarily its eastern neighborhoods.
Some of those areas have been decimated, according to a New York Times analysis of satellite images. One Gaza City neighborhood, Zeitoun, was transformed into a barren wasteland over the course of a few weeks in August, when many if not most of its buildings were destroyed.
In recent weeks, a U.N.-backed panel of food experts has said there was famine in Gaza City, and a U.N. commission investigating the war in Gaza has said Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians there. Israel has denied both claims.
Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.
Liam Stack is a Times reporter who covers the culture and politics of the New York City region.
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