RAFAH: At least 16 people were killed in Israeli air strikes in the southern city of Rafah on Sunday, said medics in Gaza.
The development comes hours after Hamas killed three Israeli soldiers.
“The toll of martyrs in Rafah reached 16,” emergency responders told media, saying that seven people from one family and nine from another were killed in the Israeli strike.
According to medical sources the strikes took place at two different locations in the bordering city.
Earlier in the day three Israeli soldiers were killed in a Hamas rocket attack, near the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah.
Hamas’s armed wing claimed responsibility for an attack on the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza on Sunday.
Israel’s military alleged that 10 projectiles were fired from Rafah in southern Gaza toward the area of the crossing, which it said was now closed to trucks carrying humanitarian aid.
Hamas says commercial crossing was not the target
Hamas said the commercial crossing point was not the target of the attack. More than a million Palestinians are taking refuge in Rafah, near the border with Egypt.
Soon after the Hamas attack, an Israeli airstrike targeted a house in Rafah killing three people and injuring several others, Palestinian medics said.
The Israeli military confirmed the strike, saying it hit the launcher from which the Hamas projectiles were fired.
Gaza health officials said just before midnight, an Israeli air strike killed nine Palestinians, including a baby, in another residential building in Rafah.
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Israel is facing mounting pressure to hold fire as the operation in Rafah could derail fragile humanitarian efforts in Gaza.
According to Gaza’s health ministry, more than 34,600 Palestinians have been killed, 29 of them in the past 24 hours, and more than 77,000 have been injured in Israel’s strikes.
