Agencies
Gaza
Almost 100 people have been killed in new Israeli strikes in the north of the Gaza Strip, the Hamas-controlled press office said on Sunday.
An Israeli bomb hit a five-storey residential block in the city of Beit Lahia, killing 72 people, it said. The building housed families displaced from their homes in other parts of the Gaza Strip. Many women and children were reported among the victims.
A further 24 people were killed and several injured in Israeli airstrikes on the al-Bureij and Nuseirat refugee camps in the centre of the Gaza Strip, the press office said.
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that rescue workers were looking for bodies and survivors in the rubble.
Israeli attacks on residential buildings in Beit Lahiya, Nuseirat and Bureij in Gaza have killed 96 Palestinians since this morning, the Gaza media office has said in a statement that condemned the attacks.
"The occupation army knew that these houses and residential buildings contained dozens of displaced civilians, most of whom were children and women,” the statement said.
The media office said it holds Israel, as well as the US administration, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and other "countries participating in the genocide” fully responsible for the "continuation of the ethnic cleansing war”.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has killed at least 43,846 Palestinians and wounded 103,740 since October 7, 2023.
Meanwhile, Pope Francis has suggested the global community should study whether Israel’s military campaign in Gaza constitutes a genocide of the Palestinian people, in some of his most explicit criticism yet of Israel’s conduct in its yearlong war.
In excerpts published from a forthcoming book, the pontiff said some international experts say "what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide.
"We should investigate carefully to assess whether this fits into the technical definition [of genocide] formulated by international jurists and organisations,” the pope said in the excerpts, published by Italian daily La Stampa.