Israeli airstrikes killed 33 Palestinians, including 13 children, in Gaza early on Sunday, Gaza health officials said, and Palestinian fighters fired rockets into Israel as hostilities stretched into a seventh day.
The pre-dawn attacks were on houses in the centre of Gaza City, health officials said. A spokesman for the Israeli military said he would look into these reports.
Among the areas under fire, the Israeli military confirmed it has targeted the home of Gaza’s top Hamas leader after nearly a week of heavy airstrikes and rocket fire into Israel from the territory ruled by the fighter group.
Brig Gen Hidai Zilberman, an army spokesman, told Israel’s army radio Sunday that the military targeted the home of Yehiyeh Sinwar, the most senior Hamas leader inside the territory, who is likely in hiding along with the rest of the group’s upper echelon.
His home is located in the town of Khan Younis, in southern Gaza Strip, Hamas and the group have acknowledged 20 fighters killed since the fighting broke out Monday, while Israel says the real number is far higher.
The death toll in Gaza jumped to 181, including 52 children, since the fighting erupted last Monday. In Israel, 10 people including two children have been killed in rocket attacks by Hamas and other groups.
With no sign of an end to the worst outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian violence in years, the United Nations Security Council was due to meet later on Sunday to discuss the situation.
Both Israel and Hamas said they would continue their cross-border fire after Israel destroyed a 12-storey building in Gaza City on Saturday that housed the US Associated Press and Qatar-based Al Jazeera media operations.
The Israel military said the al-Jala building was a legitimate military target, containing Hamas military offices, and that it had given advance warnings to civilians to get out of the building.
The AP condemned the attack, and asked Israel to put forward evidence. “We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building,” it said in a statement.
In what Hamas called a reprisal for Israel’s destruction of the al-Jala building, Hamas fired 120 rockets overnight, the Israeli military said, with many intercepted and around a dozen falling short and landing in Gaza.
Israelis dashed for bomb shelters as sirens warning of incoming rocket fire blared in Tel Aviv and the southern city of Beersheba. Around 10 people were injured while running for shelters, medics said.
Palestinians working to clear rubble from a building wrecked in Sunday’s air strikes recovered the bodies of a woman and man.
“These are moments of horror that no one can describe. Like an earthquake hit the area,” said Mahmoud Hmaid, a father of seven who was helping with the rescue efforts.
Across the border in the Israeli city of Ashkelon, Zvi Daphna, a physician, whose neighbourhood has been struck by several rockets, described a feeling of “fear and horror”.
Israel’s security cabinet was due to meet later Sunday to discuss the hostilities. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address late on Saturday that Israel was “still in the midst of this operation, it is still not over and this operation will continue as long as necessary”.
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Hamas began its rocket assault on Monday after weeks of tensions over a court case to evict several Palestinian families in East Jerusalem, and in retaliation for Israeli police clashes with Palestinians near the city’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, during the holy month of Ramadan.
Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital, a status not generally recognised internationally. Palestinians want East Jerusalem — captured by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war — as the capital of a future state.
Hamas and other groups have fired more than 2,000 rockets from Gaza since Monday, the Israeli military said on Saturday.
Israel has launched more than 1,000 air and artillery strikes into the densely populated coastal strip, saying they were aimed at Hamas and other targets.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reminded all sides on Saturday that “that any indiscriminate targeting of civilian and media structures violates international law and must be avoided at all costs,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a statement.
There has been a flurry of US diplomacy in recent days to try to quell the violence.
President Joe Biden’s envoy, Hady Amr, arrived in Israel on Friday for talks. Biden spoke with both Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas late on Saturday, the White House said.
In Israel, the conflict has been accompanied by violence among the country’s mixed communities of Jews and Arabs, with synagogues attacked and Arab-owned shops vandalised.
