UPDATE - 9 children among 16 Palestinians killed in Israeli attack on southern Gaza Strip

UPDATES DEATH TOLL; CHANGES HEADLINE, DECK, LEDE

By Mohamed Majed and Esat Firat

GAZA CITY, Palestine (AA) - At least nine children among 16 Palestinians were killed on Sunday in an Israeli bombing targeting several homes east of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

“At least 16 Palestinian citizens, including nine children, were killed at dawn today (Sunday) in a series of Israeli aerial and artillery strikes targeting several homes in the city of Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, as Israel’s genocidal war enters its 198th day,” the official news agency Wafa reported.

“Eight Palestinian citizens, including five children and two women, were killed in Israeli airstrikes that hit two homes in the city of Rafah,” the agency said.

"Five civilians, including four children, were killed and others were injured in an Israeli bombing that targeted a house on George Street, east of Rafah,” it added.

"Medical sources reported that a civilian, his child, and his pregnant wife were killed as a result of an Israeli strike that targeted a house for the Joudeh family in the Shaboura camp in the center of Rafah," Wafa also noted.

On Saturday, the Palestinian Civil Defense Administration in the Gaza Strip also reported that teams reached a significant number of bodies in the wreckage from an airstrike by the Israeli army on Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

"Many Palestinians were martyred in the air strike carried out by the occupation state (Israeli) army on a multi-story building belonging to the Abdulal family located on George Street in the eastern part of Rafah,” according to a statement by the Civil Defense Administration.

It highlighted that teams reached bodies under the rubble and that efforts are underway to reach the missing and injured.

Witnesses also told Anadolu that first aid and civil defense teams had reached the bodies of many, including women and children, in the building that was targeted.

Flouting the International Court of Justice’s provisional ruling, Israel continues its onslaught on Gaza where nearly 34,100 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and nearly 77,000 injured since Oct. 7, according to Palestinian health authorities.

The Israeli onslaught has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

Hostilities have continued unabated, however, and aid deliveries remain woefully insufficient to address the humanitarian catastrophe.

* Writing by Zehra Nur Duz and Ikram Kouachi