The attack comes a day after an Israeli airstrike killed dozens of people in the densely populated neighborhood.
Israeli forces bombarded the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza for the second day in a row, following an earlier assault that killed dozens of people and injured many others.
Palestinian authorities said “dozens of people were killed and injured” in Wednesday’s attack.
Footage from the scene of the attack showed people standing around large craters as rescue workers and volunteers dug through piles of rubble with their hands in search of people and bodies trapped under collapsed buildings.
News outlet AFP reported that rescuers said “entire families” were wiped out in the attack.
The Israeli military later issued a statement saying its warplanes had struck a Hamas command and control compound in Jabalia “based on specific intelligence,” killing the head of the group’s anti-tank missile unit, Muhammad A’sar.
More than 50 people were killed and dozens of others injured in the bombing of Jabalia on Tuesday, according to Palestinian authorities and the director of the Indonesian hospital, which received some of the wounded.
Mohamed Abu Al-Qumsan, a broadcast engineer at Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau, lost 19 members of his family in the attack.
The Palestinian armed group Hamas said seven captives, captured during the group’s deadly incursion into Israel on October 7, which Israeli authorities say killed more than 1,400 people and took more than 200 prisoners, were killed. in Tuesday’s attack.
“Seven detainees were killed yesterday in the Jabalia massacre, including three holders of foreign passports,” the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, said in a statement on Wednesday.
Israel defended Tuesday’s attack on Jabalia, which drew condemnation from human rights organizations and Middle Eastern countries including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates , claiming it was targeting a Hamas commander in the region.
Israel said its warplanes struck a “vast” tunnel complex at the site, killing “numerous Hamas terrorists,” including local battalion commander Ibrahim Biari.
UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths called the attack an “atrocity”.
“This is just the latest atrocity to hit the people of Gaza, where the fighting has entered an even more terrifying phase, with increasingly dire humanitarian consequences,” he said.
In a social media post on Wednesday, the European Union’s top diplomat, Joseph Borrell, said he was “dismayed by the high number of casualties following Israel’s bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp.”
While reiterating the EU’s support for Israel, Borrell said “the laws of war and humanity must always apply.”
