Gaza [Palestine], June 10: Israeli forces pounded central Gaza on Sunday, a day after killing 274 Palestinians during a raid, and tanks advanced into further into Rafah in an apparent bid to seal off part of the southern city.
Palestinians remained in shock over Saturday's death toll, the worst over a 24-hour period of the Gaza war for months and including many women and children, Palestinian medics said.
In an update on Sunday, Gaza's health ministry said 274 Palestinians were killed - up from 210 it reported on Saturday - and 698 were injured when Israeli special force commandos stormed into the densely populated Al-Nuseirat camp to rescue four hostages held since October by Hamas.
Sixty-four of the dead were children and 57 were women, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said on Sunday.
Israel's military said a special forces officer was killed in exchanges of fire with militants emerging from cover in residential blocks, and that it knew of "under 100" Palestinians killed, though not how many of them were fighters or civilians.
In central Gaza on Sunday, separate Israeli airstrikes on houses in the city of Deir Al-Balah and in nearby Al-Bureij killed three Palestinians in each location, while tanks shelled parts of Al-Nuseirat and Al-Maghazi, medics said.
Al-Maghazi, Al-Nuseirat and Al-Bureij are historic, urbanised refugee camps often caught up in the current war..
The Israeli military said in a statement its forces were continuing operations east of Al-Bureij and Deir al-Balah, killing a number of Palestinian gunmen and destroying infrastructure.
Israel sent forces into Rafah in May in what it called a mission to wipe out Hamas' last intact combat units after eight months of war, in which Israeli forces have bombed much of the rest of Gaza to rubble.
Israeli tank forces have since seized Gaza's entire border strip with Egypt running through Rafah to the Mediterranean coast and invaded many districts of the city of 280,000 residents, prompting around one million displaced people who had been sheltering in Rafah to flee elsewhere.
On Sunday, tanks advanced into two new districts in an apparent effort to complete the encirclement of the entire eastern side of Rafah, touching off clashes with dug-in Hamas-led armed groups, according to residents trapped in their homes.
As of June 5, all but around 100,000 displaced people who took refuge in eastern Rafah after taking flight from Israeli offensives further north in Gaza had left, according to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA.
Source: Qatar Tribune
