GAZA STRIP: Gaza's civil defence agency said Israeli strikes killed at least 42 people Friday in the Palestinian territory, devastated by war and under a total Israeli aid blockade for two months.
Israel resumed its military campaign in the Gaza Strip on March 18 after the collapse of a ceasefire that had largely halted the fighting.
Nine people were killed when an Israeli air strike hit a home in Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, civil defence official Mohammed al-Mughayyir told AFP.
AFP footage in the aftermath of a strike on Bureij camp showed Palestinians searching for casualties in the rubble of a flattened building.
"They gave us no warning, no phone call -— we woke up at midnight to smoke, rubble, stones, and shrapnel raining down on us", said Mohammed al-Sheikh, standing amongst collapsed concrete slabs.
"We pulled out martyrs -- bodies and limbs from under the rubble."
Another six people were killed in a strike targeting the Al-Masri family home in the northern city of Beit Lahia, civil defence official Mughayyir added.
In Gaza City, a strike on a community kitchen claimed the lives of six more, the civil defence agency reported.
Across the Gaza Strip, at least 21 other deaths were reported in similar attacks, the agency said.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Thursday that at least 2,326 people have been killed since Israel resumed its campaign in Gaza, bringing the overall death toll since the war broke out to 52,418.
Israel halted aid deliveries to Gaza on March 2, days before the collapse of the ceasefire which had come into effect on January 19.
The United Nations has repeatedly warned of the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe on the ground, with famine again looming.
On Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said the humanitarian response in Gaza was on the "verge of total collapse".
"This situation must not -- and cannot -- be allowed to escalate further," its deputy director of operations, Pascal Hundt, said in a statement.
