90 Palestinians killed in Gaza strikes

Israel said there was “no certainty” it killed Hamas’s military chief Mohammed Deif in a strike on Saturday on southern Gaza, where officials reported at least 90 killed in a displacement camp.

The Israeli military said it had targeted Deif and Rafa Salama, a brigade commander, calling them “two of the masterminds of the October 7 massacre” which sparked the war, now in its 10th month.

The pair’s fate remained unclear, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying late on Saturday there was “no certainty” that either man was killed in the strike.

The deaths in Al-Mawasi, an Israeli-designated “safe zone” where aid groups said hundreds of thousands of people were sheltering, drew condemnation from governments across the region.

Egypt’s foreign ministry said such “crimes... cannot be accepted under any justification whatsoever”.

The health ministry in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip said there were at least “90 martyrs”, with at least half women and children, and 300 people wounded in Al-Mawasi. AFP could not independently confirm the toll.

The Israeli military said of its attack targeting Deif that “the area that was struck is an open area, surrounded by trees, several buildings and sheds. It was not a tent complex, but an operational compound”.

A Hamas statement rejected Israel’s claim it had targeted Deif, saying it was intended “to cover up the magnitude of the horrific massacre”.

Further north, heavy fighting has raged for weeks in and around Gaza City. On Saturday the civil defence agency said at least 20 people were killed in a strike on Al-Shati refugee camp.

In Al-Mawasi, AFPTV footage showed sirens wailing and smoke rising in the distance as men used blankets to collect victims. Some were clearly beyond help and lay dead on the road.

“What did we do?” a woman screamed in the street. “What did we do? We were just sitting near the beach.” Philippe Lazarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, described the area as “a sandy 14-square-kilometre (5.4-square-mile) agricultural land, where people are left out in the open with little to no buildings or roads”.

“The claim that people in Gaza can move to ‘safe’ or ‘humanitarian’ zones is false”, said Lazarini on social media site X.

The UN human rights office in a statement said Israel “continues to choose weapons with wide area effect in densely populated areas”, suggesting “a rampant disregard for the safety of civilians”.