At least twelve people have been killed in new Israeli attacks in parts of Gaza City, Palestinian doctors said on Saturday.
The Israeli military said airstrikes hit targets in Shejaiya, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, including cells of militants who were about to attack Israeli soldiers.
Ground troops also fought gunmen above ground and in tunnels, the army said, and large quantities of weapons and ammunition were found during the operations.
Palestinian medics and witnesses said children were among the dead in Gaza City. The official Palestinian WAFA news agency said residential buildings were hit.
Reports of fighting in Gaza could not be independently confirmed.
The Israeli military on Thursday called on residents of several neighborhoods in Gaza City, in the northern part of the Strip, to flee, usually a sign of impending new Israeli military operations.
They were told to go to a designated “humanitarian zone” in the south of the area. However, after almost nine months of war, humanitarian conditions in the zones designated as safe are disastrous and civilians are often not protected there.
At the beginning of the year, Israel had described the northern Gaza Strip as largely secure and Hamas as definitively weakened. In the meantime, however, the Islamist terror group has apparently regrouped.
