Israeli airstrikes crush apartments in Gaza refugee camp, as ground troops battle Hamas militants

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — A barrage of Israeli airstrikes leveled apartment buildings in a refugee camp near Gaza City on Tuesday, and footage showed rescuers pulling men, women and children from the rubble. Israel said the strike destroyed a Hamas command center set up in civilian houses and an underground tunnel network.

The toll from the strikes in the Jabaliya camp was not immediately known. The director of the nearby hospital where casualties were taken, Dr. Atef Al-Kahlot, said hundreds of people were wounded or killed, but he did not provide exact figures.

The Israeli military said dozens of militants were killed, including a key Hamas commander for northern Gaza.

Israel aggressively defended the attack, with military spokesman Jonathan Conricus saying the targeted commander had also been a key planner of the bloody Oct. 7 rampage that started the war, and that the apartment buildings collapsed only because the vast underground Hamas complex had been destroyed.

Neither side’s account could be independently confirmed.

The strike underlined the anticipated surge in casualties on both sides as Israeli troops battling Hamas militants advance deeper into the northern Gaza Strip toward dense, residential neighborhoods. Israel has vowed to crush Hamas’ ability to govern Gaza or threaten Israel following the Oct. 7 assault, which ignited the war. Hamas, an Islamic militant group, openly calls for the destruction of Israel.

Israel said two of its soldiers were killed in fighting in northern Gaza, the first military deaths it reported since the ground offensive into the tiny Mediterranean territory accelerated late last week.

Several hundred thousand Palestinians remain in northern Gaza in the path of the ground assault. They have crowded into homes or are packed by the thousands into hospitals that are already overwhelmed with patients and running low on supplies.

In the Jabaliya refugee camp — a densely built-up area of small streets on Gaza City’s outskirts — footage of the scene from Al-Jazeera TV showed at least four large craters where buildings once stood amid rubble surrounded by partially collapsed structures.

Dozens of rescue workers and bystanders dug through the wreckage, searching for survivors beneath the pancaked buildings. Young men carried the limp forms of two children from the upper floors of a damaged apartment block’s crumbling frame while helping down another child and woman. It was unclear whether the children were alive or dead.

The Israeli military said it carried out a wide-scale strike in Jabaliya on Hamas infrastructure “that had taken over civilian buildings.”

Brig. Gen. Daniel Hagari said an underground Hamas installation beneath a targeted building collapsed, toppling other nearby buildings. Conricus later said the main strike had hit between buildings.

“We don’t intend for the ground to collapse,” he told reporters. “But the issue is that Hamas built their tunnels there and that they’re running their operations from there.”