Gazans are mourning an attack that officials say left dozens dead

A busy neighborhood in central Gaza, where many Palestinians fleeing the fighting had taken refuge, mourned a new trauma on Monday after health officials in Gaza said an overnight attack there had killed dozens of people.

Photos of the aftermath on Monday showed a gray concrete building with gaping dark holes where rooms used to be. There was a pile of rubble at the base of the building, where men appeared to be digging for survivors or bodies.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said 70 people were killed in Sunday’s attacks on the Al Maghazi neighborhood. But the continued difficulty of reaching residents of Gaza, where electricity shortages and communications disruptions have often clouded the picture of the war’s impact, left details hazy.

Ministry officials blamed Israeli airstrikes for the deaths. The Israeli military said Monday it was assessing the episode.

The attack underscored the risk to civilians as fighting intensifies. Israeli forces are pushing deeper into central Gaza, while also continuing to battle Hamas fighters in the north and south of the enclave. Many places in central and southern Gaza are full of people who have fled their homes.

“It’s as if these missiles were made to destroy mountains and not people,” said Mohamed Abu Shaah, who had taken shelter with his wife and seven daughters in an acquaintance’s house in Al Maghazi. In Al Maghazi, he said, the influx of new displaced people meant that 20 people routinely crowded into one room to sleep at night.

It was the fifth time his own family had packed up and rushed to a new place after fighting and airstrikes threatened the place where they had taken refuge.

“We are doing everything we can to run for our lives,” he said.

The rising death toll in Gaza, which Health Ministry officials say is around 20,000 people, prompted Pope Francis on Monday to focus his Christmas address partly on the plight of the Palestinians, but also on Israeli hostages held in Gaza.

He mentioned Bethlehem, the holy city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank where officials have largely canceled Christmas festivities in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, and called for peace in Israel and the Palestinian territories where war is devastating the lives of those peoples. ”

The Pope also called for “an end to military operations with their horrific harvest of innocent civilian victims” and “for a solution to the desperate humanitarian situation by opening up humanitarian aid.”

Gaza is controlled by Hamas, the armed group that led the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, which Israeli officials say killed about 1,200 people.

Mr Abu Shaah said he was returning from prayers late on Sunday evening and was about to put his daughters to sleep in the bed nine of them shared when they heard a loud thud. Afraid of being buried under the rubble, they ran downstairs to a scene of destruction.

“We’ve seen a lot, but this is beyond anything we could have imagined,” he said. “Today my family and I are still alive, but what about tomorrow?”

Before the war, about 33,000 Palestinians lived in Al Maghazi, an area covering only about a quarter of a square mile, according to the United Nations agency that helps Palestinians. Most of the families in the area originally came from villages in central and southern Palestine before fleeing or being forcibly displaced in the 1948 war that surrounded Israel’s establishment as a state.

According to UN reports, the neighborhood has been hit several times.

Save the Children, an aid group, called the attack on Al Maghazi “another episode of the ongoing horror” in Gaza.

“Families and children are not targets and must be protected,” read a message on X, formerly known as Twitter. “We need an immediate and definitive ceasefire to end this misery.”