Israel strikes area packed with displaced civilians in southern Gaza

The Israeli military said early Tuesday that it had targeted militants with airstrikes that slammed into a humanitarian area in the southern Gaza Strip, leaving large craters where Palestinians had crowded for shelter. Gaza health officials said that at least 19 people had been confirmed dead, with more than 60 others injured, and that more victims were under the rubble.

The Israeli military said in a statement that its targets were three senior Hamas militants who had been involved in the October 7 Hamas-led assault on Israel and who were operating from within Muwasi, a zone in southern Gaza that Israeli forces have designated as safer for civilians than other parts of the territory.

Earlier, an official with Civil Defense emergency services in Gaza, Muhammad Al-Mughaier, had said that 40 bodies were recovered from the site of the strike. The reason for the discrepancy was not immediately clear, although official accounts of death tolls often fluctuate in the early hours after an attack. The death toll reported by the Gaza Health Ministry appeared likely to rise because it said that there were still victims in the area, including some buried in rubble and sand, and that ambulances had not been able to reach them.

Health officials in Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and combatants when reporting casualties.

Videos of the aftermath of the attack verified by The New York Times show craters in the southwest of Muwasi, where satellite imagery from a week earlier showed several tents. Images taken at the scene Tuesday morning show people searching in rubble using the lights on their phones, and emergency workers from the Palestine Red Crescent Society digging with shovels.

The Israeli military disputed the death toll reported by Civil Defense, saying in a statement that those figures "do not align with the information" it has. It said it had carried out a "precise strike" and had tried to mitigate the risk to civilians, though it declined to answer questions from the Times about the specific steps it had taken.

Marwan Shaath, who has been sheltering with his family in Muwasi for more than three months, described being awakened without warning at about midnight by big explosions that were close enough to rattle his tent.

"It was like an earthquake," he said. "The entire area, and of course the tent, all kept shaking."

Shaath, a 57-year-old civil servant with the Palestinian Authority who fled Israel's ground operation this year in the southern city of Rafah, said he had decided not to check on the damage and brought his children to their school tent, hoping to keep them focused on education rather than on "strikes and death."

"It was one more tough night for us waiting for this war to come to an end and to go back to what is left of my home in Rafah," he said.

Muwasi, a once sparsely populated part of southern Gaza, is now packed with tens of thousands of Palestinians who took shelter there. The Israeli military has designated the area as a humanitarian zone, but it has maintained that it will go after militants wherever it believes them to be. Israeli airstrikes also hit the area in July, in operations the military said were aimed at Hamas commanders. At the time, Gaza health officials said that strike had killed scores of people.

In its statement on Tuesday, the Israeli military said that it had conducted aerial surveillance in the hours before the strike that it said confirmed the presence of militants in the area where it struck.

Israeli has long said that Hamas embeds itself among civilians to use them as human shields. International law experts have said Israel still has a responsibility to protect civilians during its military operations. More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza in 11 months of war, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The United Nations and other rights organizations have said that there is no safe place in Gaza. Almost the entire population of Gaza -- more than 2 million Palestinians -- has been displaced multiple times. Israel has ordered frequent evacuations and has shrunk the size of the humanitarian zone, forcing an increasing number of Palestinians to squeeze into ever tighter areas.