Sixty-four of the dead were children and 57 were women, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said on Sunday.
Hamas’ armed wing said on Sunday three Israeli hostages, including one with US citizenship, were killed during the raid, but provided no names. It released a video of what appeared to be corpses with censor bars obscuring their faces.
A Hamas assertion on Saturday that some hostages had died was rejected as “a blatant lie” by the Israeli military.
Gaza’s health ministry said another 798 Palestinians were injured in the Israeli raid, and one of them, four-year-old Tawfiq Abu Youssef, was in critical condition when visited in hospital on Sunday by his father Raed.
The boy was first thought to have died before he moved his hand slightly while in the arms of a relative rushing him to hospital – captured in a video that went viral on social media.
“I had already dug his grave,” his father said, adding that most members of his extended family were among those killed in the raid.
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GEN-Z VS GENOCIDE: HOPE FOR HUMANITY?
GEN-Z VS GENOCIDE: HOPE FOR HUMANITY?
In central Gaza on Sunday, Israeli strikes on houses in the city of Deir al-Balah and in the nearby al-Bureij refugee camp killed three Palestinians in each location, while tanks shelled parts of al-Nuseirat and al-Maghazi camps, doctors said.
The Israeli military said in a statement its forces were continuing operations east of al-Bureij and Deir al-Balah, killing a number of Palestinian gunmen and destroying militant infrastructure.
Israel sent forces into Rafah in May in what it called a mission to wipe out Hamas’ last intact combat units after eight months of war, in which Israeli forces have bombed much of the rest of Gaza to rubble while advancing against fierce resistance from militants embedded in crowded cities and built-up camps.
On Sunday, tanks advanced into two new districts in an apparent effort to complete the encirclement of the entire eastern side of Rafah, touching off clashes with dug-in Hamas-led armed groups, according to residents trapped in their homes.
Palestinian doctors said an Israeli air strike on a house in Tel Al-Sultan in western Rafah killed two people.
The Israeli military said troops of its 162nd division were raiding some districts of Rafah where they had located “numerous additional terror tunnel shafts, mortars, and [other] weapons” belonging to Palestinian Islamist militants.
Hamas precipitated the war with a lightning cross-border attack into Israel last October 7, killing around 1,200 people and seizing more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. About half the hostages were freed during a brief November truce.
Israel’s ensuing air and ground war in Gaza has killed at least 37,084 Palestinians, the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said in its Sunday update. The ministry says thousands more dead are feared buried under the rubble.
A humanitarian catastrophe has unfolded as the war has dragged on, with more than three-quarters of Gaza’s 2.3 million population displaced, malnutrition widespread and basic infrastructure in ruins.
Concern about an escalation in Israeli-Hezbollah hostilities and a sharp decline in expectations of a Gaza ceasefire have weakened Israel’s shekel currency by 3 per cent to 3.75 to the dollar since June 4.