Israeli attacks have targeted refugee camps in Gaza for days, destroying buildings in tightly packed neighborhoods.
Gaza authorities say 15 people have been killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Bureij refugee camp, marking the third bombing of a camp in as many days.
A Gaza Civil Defense spokesman said Thursday’s strike in central Gaza hit a residential building and residents reported many people were trapped under the rubble.
“My family and I were sitting and all of a sudden we heard a huge explosive. Everything was flying around us. We couldn’t see anything but dust and smoke. It was huge. The whole area is turned upside down… in one second,” one survivor told Al Jazeera.
“This was my house (pointing to the rubble). Today it is completely in ruins. I do not know what to say. We are powerless. »
Bureij is a relatively small refugee camp located in the middle of the Gaza Strip. It is home to approximately 46,000 Palestinian refugees registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
In recent days, Israel has carried out numerous strikes on refugee camps inside Gaza, often among the most densely populated areas of the besieged enclave.
Israel says it is targeting commanders of the Palestinian armed group Hamas, which carried out deadly attacks in southern Israel on October 7 that Israeli authorities say killed more than 1,400 people, most of them civilians.
But Israel’s bombing campaign is under scrutiny as it destroys entire blocks of homes and cuts off access to food, fuel and electricity for the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million residents.
Palestinian authorities said more than 9,000 people were killed in the bombings and more than half of Gaza’s population was displaced.
In addition to the bombardment of Bureij, Israel also struck the Jabalia camp on Thursday for the third consecutive day. Palestinian authorities said Israeli strikes on Jabalia have so far killed 195 people and left 120 missing.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said such “disproportionate attacks” could amount to war crimes.
Residents of Bureij chanted “a massacre, a massacre” as they covered the bodies of those killed in Thursday’s attack with blankets.
Like many such camps in Gaza, it was originally built for Palestinian refugees from villages depopulated by Zionist forces during the founding of Israel in 1948, from which Palestinians were then prohibited from returning. . The refugees settled in Bureij mostly came from Palestinian towns east of Gaza.