Gaza rescuers say children among 10 killed in Israeli strike

Gaza City, Palestinian Territories: Gaza rescuers said a pre-dawn Israeli air strike Friday killed 10 members of the same family, while the UN stated that dozens of recent Israeli attacks on the Palestinian territory had left only women and children dead.

The UN rights office report also warned that expanding Israeli evacuation orders were resulting in the "forcible transfer" of people into ever-shrinking spaces in the Palestinian territory, where the war began 18 months ago.

Israel resumed intense strikes on the Gaza Strip on March 18, ending a two-month ceasefire with Hamas.

Since then, more than 1,500 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the territory to which Israel cut off aid more than a month ago.

"Ten people, including seven children, were brought to the hospital as martyrs following an Israeli air strike that targeted the Farra family home in central Khan Yunis," Gaza civil defence agency spokesperson Mahmud Bassal told AFP.

Medics and rescuers transported the dead and injured to hospital in multiple ambulances, with several bodies wrapped in white shrouds and blankets, AFP footage of the aftermath showed.

Footage of the house showed a heavily destroyed structure. Mangled concrete slabs and twisted metal were strewn across the site.

Witnesses reported continuous and intensive Israeli tank fire in Khan Yunis.

The civil defence agency also reported two people killed in an Israeli strike in the Al-Atatra area in the northern city of Beit Lahia.

'Women and children'

Early on Friday, the Israeli military issued an "urgent and serious" evacuation warning to residents of several areas east of Gaza City.

A separate military statement said its forces had overnight "deepened ground activity in the Morag Corridor," referring to a new buffer zone between the southern cities of Rafah and Khan Yunis.

The UN on Friday decried the impact of ongoing Israeli strikes across Gaza, finding that "a large percentage of fatalities are children and women".

"Between 18 March and 9 April 2025, there were some 224 incidents of Israeli strikes on residential buildings and tents for internally displaced people," the United Nations human rights office said in Geneva.

It said that "in some 36 strikes about which the UN Human Rights Office corroborated information, the fatalities recorded so far were only women and children".

Gaza's health ministry said on Thursday that at least 1,522 Palestinians have been killed in the renewed Israeli operations since March 18, taking the overall death toll since the start of the war to 50,886.