Israeli occupation forces kill at least 69 in Gaza

Gaza's civil defence agency said Israeli forces killed at least 69 Palestinians on Thursday, including 15 in a strike on a school sheltering people displaced by the war nearing its 22nd month.

Israel has recently expanded its military operations in the Gaza Strip, creating dire humanitarian conditions and displacing nearly all of the territory's population of more than two million.

Many have sought shelter in school buildings, but these have repeatedly come under Israeli attacks.

In an updated toll on Thursday afternoon, civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that 69 people were killed by Israeli strikes, artillery or gunfire across the territory. They included 38 people waiting for humanitarian aid at three separate locations in central and southern Gaza and a child killed by a drone in Jabalia in the north.

Bassal said 15 people, "the majority of them children and women", were killed and several others wounded in an Israeli air strike on a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City. 

- Strike hits school - 

At the Gaza City school compound hit on Thursday, AFP footage showed young children wandering through the charred, bombed out building, as piles of burnt debris smouldered.

Groups of Palestinians picked through the rubble and damaged furniture that littered the floor.

Umm Yassin Abu Awda, who was among mourners who gathered at the city's Al-Shifa hospital after the strike, said: "This isn't a life. We've suffered enough."

"For two years, we've been fighting just to get a piece of bread," she told AFP.

"Either you (Israel) strike us with a nuclear bomb and end it all, or people's conscience needs to finally wake up."

Bassal of the civil defence agency reported 25 people killed while seeking aid near the Netzarim area in central Gaza, six others at another location nearby and seven in Rafah, southern Gaza, with scores of people injured.

They were the latest in a string of deadly incidents that have hit people trying to receive scarce supplies.

Across Gaza on Thursday, Bassal said artillery shelling in the northern town of Beit Lahia killed three people.

Further south, he said three people were killed in a strike that hit tents housing displaced people in the coastal Al-Mawasi area.

Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties in accessing many areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by the civil defence agency. 

- 'Finish the job' -

Despite mounting calls at home and globally for a ceasefire, Israel's hardline National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir called on Wednesday to push the offensive harder.

"Let's finish the job in Gaza. We must bring down Hamas, occupy the Gaza Strip, encourage the transfer" of Palestinians out of the territory, Ben Gvir said in a television interview.

To the minister, Israel was now "in a position to achieve" victory over Hamas, which he said would help free the remaining hostages still held in Gaza from the 2023 attacks.

"We must bring them back, but the way to bring them back is to bring down Hamas," he said.

Israel has killed at least 57,130 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians. The United Nations considers thes figures reliable.