ADVERTISEMENTCivil defence workers have dug around 60 bodies out of collapsed buildings in two districts of Gaza City after the Israeli military pulled back following days of fighting against Hamas.
The Israeli military launched an incursion into the Tal al-Hawa and Sinaah districts earlier this week to fight what it said were Hamas militants who had regrouped there.
Videos circulating on social media showed civil defence workers wrapping bodies, including several women, in blankets on the rubble-strewn streets of Tal al-Hawa and Sinaah.
About 60 bodies have been found so far, including entire families who appeared to have been killed by artillery fire and airstrikes as they tried to flee, said Mahmoud Bassal, the director of civil defence in Gaza.
Some bodies had been partially devoured by dogs, others burned inside homes and others remained unreachable in rubble, he said.
The director of nearby Al-Ahli Hospital, Fadel Naem, said at least 40 bodies found in the districts had been brought to the facility, though he didn’t have a precise number.
The Israeli military said it could not comment on the discovery of the bodies.
Israel's assault on the districts began after it issued an evacuation order for the area on Monday. In a statement on Friday, the military said its troops targeted the abandoned headquarters of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, where it said Hamas had set up operations.
UNRWA left the compound in October, early in the war. The military said on Friday that troops had battled Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters in the compound and discovered material for building drones and stashes of weapons.
It issued photos of some of the discovered material, though the claims could not be independently confirmed.
On Friday, troops had withdrawn from most of the area, but snipers and drones continued to open fire, said Salem Elrayyes, a resident who fled months ago to the south but spoke to family members still in the neighbourhood.
A day earlier, civil defence workers said they found dozens of bodies in Shijaiyah, another Gaza City district from which Israeli troops withdrew in recent days after a two-week offensive.
Most of the population of Gaza City and the surrounding areas in the north fled earlier in the war but the UN estimates that some 300,000 people remain in the north.
With each new assault, people often flee to other parts of the north, since so far Israel has not allowed those who flee south to return to the north.
Israel launched its campaign in Gaza after the Hamas incursion into Israel on October 7 in which militants stormed into the south and killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted about 250.
Since then, Israeli ground offensives and bombardments have killed more than 38,300 people in Gaza and wounded more than 88,000, according to the territory’s health ministry.
The ministry does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its count.
More than 80% of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes, and most are now crowded into squalid tent camps, facing widespread hunger.