At least 42 Palestinians killed as Israel ramps up Gaza attacks 

At least 42 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza, according to medical sources.

Twenty-four people were killed in Israeli strikes on central Gaza’s Nuseirat, one of the enclave’s eight longstanding refugee camps, sources told Al Jazeera on Friday.

An Israeli air strike killed at least 10 Palestinians in a house in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday, medics said.

Others were killed in the northern and southern areas of the enclave, medics added.

The Israeli military on Thursday said its forces were continuing to “strike terror targets as part of the operational activity in the Gaza Strip”.

Israeli tanks had entered northern and western areas of Nuseirat on Thursday.

Some tanks withdrew from northern areas on Friday but remained active in western parts of the camp, the Reuters news agency reported.

The Palestinian Civil Defence said teams were unable to respond to distress calls from residents trapped in their homes.

Dozens of displaced Palestinians returned on Friday to areas where the army had retreated to check on damage to their homes. Medics and relatives covered up dead bodies, including of women, that lay on the road with blankets or white shrouds and carried them away on stretchers.

Medics said an Israeli drone strike killed Ahmed al-Kahlout, head of the Intensive Care Unit at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, on the northern edge of Gaza, where the Israeli ground forces have been operating since early October.

Kamal Adwan Hospital is one of three medical facilities on the northern edge of Gaza that barely function now due to shortages of medical, fuel, and food supplies.

Most of its medical staff have been detained or expelled by the Israeli army, health officials say.

The Israeli army said its forces operating in Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoon and Jabalia since October 5 aimed to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping and waging attacks from those areas.

Residents have accused the army of depopulating the towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoon as well as the Jabalia refugee camp.

Separately, two children and a woman were crushed to death on Friday as a crowd of Palestinians pushed to get bread at a bakery in Gaza amid a worsening food crisis in the war-ravaged territory, according to medics in Gaza.

The bodies of two girls aged 13 and 17 and a 50-year-old woman were taken to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, where a doctor confirmed that they died from suffocation due to crowding at the al-Banna bakery.

Meanwhile, Israeli authorities released about 30 Palestinians whom it had detained in the past few months during its Gaza offensive.

Those released arrived at a hospital in southern Gaza for medical checkups, medics said.

Freed Palestinians, detained during the war, have complained of ill-treatment and torture in Israeli detention after they were released. Israel denies torture.

Months of efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza have yielded scant progress, and negotiations are now on hold.

A ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, took effect before dawn on Wednesday, bringing a halt to hostilities that had escalated sharply in recent months and had overshadowed the Gaza conflict.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed at least 44,363 people, mostly women and children, since October 2023, according to Palestinian health officials.

Israel launched its war on Gaza after Hamas led an attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing at least 1,139 people and seizing approximately 250 others as captives.