DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip – An Israeli airstrike on a hospital courtyard in the Gaza Strip early Monday killed at least four people and flames ripped through a crowded tent camp for those displaced by the war. According to Palestinian medics, more than two dozen suffered severe burns.

The Israeli military said it was targeting militants hiding among civilians, without providing evidence. In recent months there have been repeated overcrowded accommodations and tent camps, with allegations that Hamas fighters had used them as a target.

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in downtown Deir al-Balah was already struggling to treat a large number of injured in an earlier attack on a school-turned-shelter nearby that killed at least 20 people were killed when the airstrike struck early in the morning and fire engulfed many of the tents.

Associated Press footage showed children among the wounded. A man sobbed as he carried a toddler with a bandaged head. Another small child with a bandaged leg received a blood transfusion on the floor of the crowded hospital.

Hospital records showed four people were killed and 40 were injured. According to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, 25 people were transferred to Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza after suffering severe burns.

Israel is still carrying out almost daily attacks across the Gaza Strip more than a year after the war began and is carrying out a major ground assault in the north, where militants are said to have regrouped.

The war began when Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, while Palestinian militants kidnapped about 250 hostages. About 100 people are still held in the Gaza Strip, a third of whom are believed to be dead.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, over 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's retaliatory offensive. Gaza's health ministry did not say how many were fighters, but said more than half of those killed were women and children. Around 90% of Gaza's 2.3 million residents were displaced by the war, often multiple times, and large parts of the coastal area were completely destroyed.

Israel has ordered the entire remaining population of the northern third of the Gaza Strip, estimated at about 400,000 people, to evacuate to the south and has stopped allowing food to reach the north since the beginning of the month. Hundreds of thousands of people from the north followed Israeli evacuation orders at the start of the war and were not allowed to return.

This has raised fears among Palestinians that Israel intends to implement a plan devised by former generals that would expel all civilians from the northern Gaza Strip and designate anyone who remains there as a combatant – a surrender-or-starve strategy According to human rights groups, it would violate international law. The plan was submitted to the Israeli government, but it is unclear whether it was accepted.

With no end to the war in Gaza in sight, Israel is also waging an air and ground war in southern Lebanon against the militant Hezbollah group, an ally of Hamas, which has been firing rockets into northern Israel for more than a year. Israel has also threatened to attack Iran in retaliation for a ballistic missile attack, raising the prospect of an all-out war across the region.

According to the military, four soldiers were killed and seven others seriously injured in an air strike by Hezbollah on an army base in northern Israel on Sunday, according to the military. It was the militant group's deadliest attack since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon nearly two weeks ago.

Lebanon-based Hezbollah called the attack near the town of Binyamina retaliation for Israeli attacks on Beirut on Thursday that killed 22 people. It said it targeted Israel's elite Golani Brigade and fired dozens of missiles during the attack by “squadrons” of drones to occupy Israeli air defense systems.

According to the Israeli emergency service, 61 people were injured in the attack. With Israel's advanced air defense systems, it is rare for so many people to be injured by drones or missiles.

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Magdy reported from Cairo.

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For more of AP's war coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war.