The IDF has said it is “reviewing” an airstrike which reportedly hit a popular seaside cafe in Gaza City.
According to the Hamas-run Civil Defence Agency, 24 Palestinians were killed in the strike –though this could not be independently verified and official death tolls in Gaza do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Announcing an investigation into the attack, the IDF confirmed it had targeted several Hamas terrorists in the northern Gaza Strip”.
An army spokesperson added that “steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians using aerial surveillance”.
However, they said that the incident was “under review” after reports that civilians had been killed.
Gaza City has been subject to widespread evacuation orders this week as the IDF intensifies its operations in the area.
Israel hopes to effectively isolate Hamas in the northern half of the Strip, allowing its forces to destroy the terror group with minimal impact on civilians, who are being encouraged to travel south to access humanitarian aid.
Eyewitness Ahmad al-Nayrab, who was walking on the nearby beach at the time of the strike, described it as a “massacre”.
He told AFP: “I saw bits of bodies flying everywhere, bodies mangled and burned. It was a bloodcurdling scene; everybody was screaming.”
The investigation comes after the IDF admitted that “inaccurate” artillery fire had killed around 30 Gazans near humanitarian aid distribution sites operated by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in the southern part of the Strip.
A spokesperson confirmed three such “tragic” incidents had taken place and that the protocols regarding the monitoring of access routes to the aid sites has been "reorganised" to prevent such incidents from happening again.
Nonetheless, the GHF programme has come under significant international scrutiny, with the UN, UK and EU calling on Jerusalem to allow UN agencies to restart their aid efforts.
These calls have now been echoed by a group of 130 humanitarian charities, including Oxfam, Save the Children and Amnesty International, which have signed a letter calling for the GHF to be shut down.
The letter claimed that the IDF soldiers operating around the sites, which sit within active combat zones, “routinely” fire on Palestinian civilians – a claim the IDF has strongly denied and which has not been independently verified.
Israel, though, maintains that the GHF system is distributing sufficient quantities of aid and is effectively preventing the looting of supplies by Hamas, which Jerusalem claims was widespread under the UN system.
