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3. Gaza Civil Defence Says 17 Killed in Israeli Strikes

Gaza's civil defence agency said on Wednesday that at least 17 people, including a baby, were killed in Israeli air strikes on the war-ravaged Palestinian territory.

The Israeli military said one of its soldiers was killed and another seriously wounded during combat in the north of the Gaza Strip.

The baby was killed in nighttime shelling of the Nuseirat refugee camp, civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said, adding a shell killed two other people west of the camp in central Gaza.

A drone strike killed two people, including a 15-year-old girl, at a school-turned-shelter for displaced people in the northern city of Beit Lahia, he said.

Since early October, the Israeli army has been waging an operation in Gaza's far north that it says is aimed at preventing Palestinian militant group Hamas from regrouping.

The military campaign has forced at least 100,000 people to flee for Gaza City and nearby areas, said Louise Wateridge, spokeswoman for the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA.

In Jabalia, also in Gaza's far north, emergency workers on Wednesday recovered the bodies of seven people from under the rubble of a house hit by an air strike the night before, Bassal said.

In southern Gaza, a person was killed when a group of Palestinians was targeted near another school in the city of Rafah on Wednesday, he said.

Strikes on a residential building in Gaza City killed two people, Bassal said, while a first responder from the agency was killed while trying to evacuate wounded people in the same area.

In the city's Zeitun neighbourhood, an air strike killed another person and wounded several others, Bassal added.

The war in Gaza began after Hamas's unprecedented October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which resulted in 1,206 deaths, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel's retaliatory military campaign has killed nearly 44,000 people in Gaza, according to figures from the territory's health ministry, which the UN considers reliable.

With AFP