At least 24 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes across Gaza since midnight Thursday, Gaza’s civil defence agency said, as the territory remains under a near-total Israeli aid blockade nearing two months.

The strikes come amid Israel’s renewed military campaign, resumed March 18 after a two-month truce with Hamas collapsed. The war began with Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.

Civil defence official Mohammed al-Mughayyir said eight people died in a strike on the Abu Sahlul family home in Khan Yunis, and four more were killed east of Shaaf in Gaza City. Twelve others were killed in separate strikes, including one that hit a tent sheltering displaced people near Deir el-Balah.

“We came here and found all these houses destroyed, and children, women and young people all bombed to pieces,” said Ahmed Abu Zarqa in Khan Yunis.
“This is no way to live. Enough, we're tired, enough!
We don't know what to do with our lives anymore. We'd rather die than live this kind of life.”

AFP images showed residents digging through rubble and bodies carried away on stretchers. At Nasser Hospital, medics rushed a wounded child from an ambulance.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said 2,326 people have been killed since Israel resumed strikes, bringing the total death toll to 52,418.

The 7 October Hamas attack killed 1,218 in Israel, mostly civilians, and militants abducted 251 people. Fifty-eight remain held in Gaza, with 34 believed dead, according to Israel.

Israel says its offensive aims to pressure Hamas to release the remaining captives.

Aid deliveries were halted just before the offensive resumed. U.N. rights chief Volker Türk called the situation a “humanitarian catastrophe.”

“Israel appears to be inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life increasingly incompatible with their continued existence as a group in Gaza,” he said.