Gaza City (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Israeli air strikes killed 32 people including children in Gaza on Saturday, according to the Palestinian territory’s civil defence agency, as the military said it had attacked in response to a Hamas ceasefire violation.

Despite a US-brokered truce entering its second phase earlier this month, violence in the Palestinian territory has continued, with both Israel and Hamas accusing each other of violating the agreement.

The latest bloodshed comes after Israel announced it would reopen the crucial Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt on Sunday for the “limited movement of people”.

“The death toll since dawn today has risen to 32, most of them children and women,” said the civil defence agency, a rescue force operating under the Hamas authority, updating an earlier toll of 28.

“Residential apartments, tents, shelters and a police station were targeted,” agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said in the statement.

A unit in an apartment building of Gaza City’s Rimal neighbourhood was left entirely destroyed, and blood spatters were visible on the street below, an AFP journalist reported.

“Three girls died while they were sleeping. We found their bodies in the street”, Samer al-Atbash, a relative of the family, told AFP.

“What truce are you talking about? Everyone is deceiving everyone else,” added Nael al-Atbash, another relative.

One strike hit the police station in the Sheikh Radwan district of Gaza City, the territory’s largest urban centre.

Gaza’s general police directorate said seven people were killed in that attack, while Bassal said the dead included four female police officers.

- Ceasefire violations -

About a dozen first responders rushed to the devastated building and pulled bodies from the rubble, an AFP journalist reported.

Another Israeli attack hit a shelter in Al-Mawasi, an area of south Gaza where tens of thousands of displaced Gazans live in tents and makeshift shelters, an AFP journalist reported.

Large plumes of smoke rose above the thousands of densely pitched tents.

The number of casualties from this strike was still not known.

Although people have been killed almost daily in Gaza since the start of the ceasefire on October 10, Saturday’s toll was particularly high.

Israel’s military said that the air strikes were retaliation for an incident on Friday in which eight Palestinian fighters exited a tunnel in the city of Rafah, in southern Gaza, which it said violated the fragile ceasefire.

It said forces “struck four commanders and additional terrorists from the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist organisations across the Gaza Strip”.

Hamas political bureau member Suhail al-Hindi rejected the military’s claims.

“What happened today is a fully fledged crime committed by a criminal enemy that does not abide by agreements or respect any commitments,” he told AFP.

The health ministry, which operates under the Hamas authority, has said Israeli attacks have killed at least 509 people in Gaza since the ceasefire came into effect.

Israel’s military says four soldiers have been killed in the same period in Gaza in suspected militant attacks.

- Rafah reopening -

Media restrictions and limited access in Gaza have meant that AFP has been unable to independently verify casualty figures or freely cover the violence.

Key mediators Egypt and Qatar condemned what they said were Israeli violations of the ceasefire.

Egypt demanded that all parties “exercise the utmost restraint” ahead of Sunday’s reopening of Rafah crossing, while Qatar said it denounced the “repeated Israeli violations of the ceasefire”.

The violence was a “dangerous escalation that will inflame the situation and undermine regional and international efforts aimed at consolidating the truce,” the Qatari foreign ministry said.

Israel has said reopening of the Rafah crossing will only allow the “limited movement of people”.

The reopening is a key element in the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement.

Israel had previously expressed its unwillingness to reopen the gateway until it received the remains of Ran Gvili, the last hostage to be held in Gaza, who was recovered earlier this week and laid to rest in Israel on Wednesday.

The Gaza war was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliation flattened much of Gaza, which was already suffering from previous rounds of fighting and from an Israeli blockade imposed since 2007.

The two-year war has left at least 71,769 people dead in Gaza, according to the health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.

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