Palestinians say 20 dead in Israeli attacks in Gaza Strip

At least 20 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip over the past day, the Palestinian territory's civil defence agency said Saturday.

In Gaza City alone, nine Palestinians were killed in multiple attacks, a spokesman for the Hamas-controlled agency told dpa.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not provide immediate comment. It regularly stresses that it is taking measures to protect civilians in the fight against the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas.

The IDF did say earlier on Saturday that it conducted an airstrike that destroyed a Hamas command post in a former school complex in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip.

There were no reports from the Israeli side of killed or injured Hamas fighters or other casualties.

But the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported, citing Palestinian sources, that at least eight people were killed in the attack on the complex, including women and children.

WAFA said refugee families had found shelter in the former school.

The Israeli military described the attack as a precision strike and said measures had been taken beforehand to limit the risk of harm to civilians.

In another incident in Jabalia, three armed fighters were killed after they were spotted by a drone leaving a tunnel shaft, according to the Israeli military.

Rescuers hampered by fuel, spare parts shortages

Fire and rescue services in embattled Gaza are only partially operational, the local civil defence authority said on Saturday.

Some of the emergency vehicles in the cities of Gaza and Khan Younis are no longer running because there are no spare parts to maintain them, according to a statement from the Hamas-controlled authority.

Spare parts warehouses and workshops have been destroyed in the course of the war by Israeli airstrikes, it said.

In addition, a severe fuel shortage has rendered more than half of the rescue service vehicles in the Gaza Strip non-operational, it said.

The Civil Defence appealed to regional and international humanitarian organizations to urgently bring spare parts and equipment to Gaza so that the emergency services transport can be maintained.

The Gaza war was triggered by the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, that saw Palestinian militants kill some 1,200 people and abduct another 250 to the Gaza Strip.

Israel responded by pounding Gaza with airstrikes and sending ground troops into the sealed-off coastal territory with the stated aim of defeating extremist group Hamas, which had controlled Gaza until then.

On Saturday, the Hamas-controlled health authority announced that more than 46,537 people have died in the Gaza Strip so far. It said that it had increased the total number of those killed by 499 people after completing the data and confirming the identities in outstanding cases.

The figures cannot independently verified and do not differentiate between civilians and fighters.

At the end of last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the military had so far "killed almost 20,000 terrorists" in the Gaza Strip - a claim that is also impossible to confirm.