Israel has begun to tear apart the Gaza ceasefire plan, as new ground assaults were launched by Israeli forces across the Yellow Line in the enclave, 24NewsHD TV channel reported on Sunday.
Israeli air strikes killed another twenty-four Palestinians, while a drone attack killed eleven more people and injured twenty others.
Since October 10, a total of 318 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks.
Earlier in the day, AFP reported that Gaza’s civil defence agency said twenty-one people were killed and dozens more wounded in multiple Israeli air strikes on Saturday, as Hamas and Israel again traded accusations of violating the fragile truce.
Saturday marked one of the deadliest days since the US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect on October 10, ending two years of war.
The Israeli military said an “armed terrorist” crossed the so-called Yellow Line in Gaza, a zone behind which Israeli troops had withdrawn, and opened fire on soldiers.
In response to the incident in southern Gaza, which occurred along a route designated for humanitarian aid deliveries, the Israeli military announced it had “begun striking terror targets in the Gaza Strip”.
Mahmud Bassal, spokesperson for the civil defence agency operating under Hamas authority, said there were “21 martyrs this evening in five separate Israeli air strikes, in a clear violation of the ceasefire in Gaza”.
He said seven people were killed and more than sixteen wounded in a strike on a house in Nuseirat in central Gaza, while four others were killed in an attack on a residential apartment in the Al-Nasr district west of Gaza City.
According to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, 312 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli fire as of Thursday since the truce began.
Bassal said another strike hit a house in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza. At Al-Aqsa Hospital in the same city, AFP witnessed children being brought in by ambulance and carried inside, while other casualties were wheeled in on stretchers.
Health ministry spokesperson Khalil al-Daqran said “more than 20 injured” had reached the hospital, “most of them women and children”, adding that many had suffered severe wounds to the head and chest.
The first reported strike on Saturday targeted a vehicle in the Al-Rimal neighbourhood of western Gaza City, killing five people and injuring several others.
An AFP photographer saw bystanders approaching the charred wreckage of the car, with children attempting to salvage food from inside.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office accused Hamas of breaching the ceasefire agreement, saying Hamas had sent a gunman into Israeli-held territory to attack soldiers.
The statement said Israel responded by killing five senior Hamas members and insisted that “Israel has fully honoured the ceasefire, Hamas has not”, urging mediators to ensure Hamas complies with its commitments.
In a statement, Hamas accused Israel of escalating violations in an attempt to undermine the ceasefire and called on mediators to intervene urgently to halt the attacks.
The Palestinian foreign ministry in the Israeli-occupied West Bank condemned the strikes and urged the international community to apply “immediate pressure” on Israel to stop what it called “massacres”.
The UN humanitarian agency OCHA said that although the ceasefire had allowed for an increase in aid deliveries into Gaza, progress was still severely limited by issues including visa restrictions, delayed import approvals and too few operational border crossings.
Jihad Abed Al-Aziz, a displaced resident of Khan Yunis, said the ceasefire was “pointless” because aid entering Gaza was nowhere near enough to meet people’s basic needs.
He said that residents had lost their homes, jobs and sense of security, adding, “Life itself has no meaning any more.”
The war began with Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,221 people. Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza has killed at least 69,733 Palestinians, according to figures from the Gaza health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.