At least five Palestinians were killed on Thursday by an Israeli airstrike on al-Zaytoun, in Gaza City, according to local officials.
Several other people were injured by the assault on the northern Gaza neighborhood, which struck just before midnight, the spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defense told CNN. One child is still unaccounted for, Mahmoud Bassal said. CNN has reached out to the Israeli military for comment.
Further north, two “huge airstrikes” hit Jabalya at around 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. local time on Friday, Bassal said. The Israel Defense Forces said it launched an “operation” with “intense combat” in Jabalya overnight, claiming to have “eliminated dozens of terrorists.”
The IDF and the ISA, Israel’s domestic security agency, said Friday they recovered the bodies of three hostages taken by Hamas, in Jabalya.
Scene on the ground: Gaza’s Civil Defense teams could not reach the area, according to Bassal. Israel’s offensive in the enclave has razed neighborhoods and battered key roads rendering parts of the north largely inaccessible to local crews and humanitarian agencies trying to aid Palestinians.
A CNN stringer on the ground filmed dozens of people fleeing a school-turned-shelter in the Falluja neighborhood, west of Jabalya. Other footage posted online of the aftermath showed entire walls blasted from the shell of the Falluja block in the Jabalya camp.
The makeshift medical unit in the area was receiving the dead and the injured, but the staff there are only able to provide advanced first aid. Two of the remaining hospitals in the north are under Israeli siege.
Benjamin Brown contributed reporting to this post.
