At least another 34 people were wounded in the overnight airstrike, said the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

First responders and residents were still digging through the rubble, hoping to find survivors, the ministry added.

An Associated Press reporter at a nearby hospital saw the bodies of at least five small children, including an infant, who had been pulled from the rubble.

Arafat Abu Mashaia, who lives in the camp, said the Israeli airstrike flattened several multi-story homes where people forced out of other parts of Gaza were sheltering.

“It was a true massacre,” he said early Sunday while standing on the wreckage of destroyed homes. “All here are peaceful people. I challenge anyone who says there were resistance (fighters) here.”

More than 9,400 Palestinians, including 3,900 children, have been killed in the strip over nearly a month of war, and that number is likely to rise as the deadly Israeli assault continues.

Continued bombardment
 

A separate strike on Sunday levelled a building near the Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. The rescue service posted a video showing medical workers rushing a wounded man to the hospital as a woman and children ran behind them.

On Saturday night, 21 Palestinians from one family were killed in an Israeli bombing on Gaza.

The health ministry said on Sunday in a post on Facebook: “21 martyrs from the Abu Hasira family were brutally targeted in their house inhabited by children and women. They arrived at Al-Shifa Medical Complex in the late night hours.”

Furthermore, an Israeli airstrike overnight struck a water well in Tal Al-Zatar in northern Gaza, cutting off water for tens of thousands of people in the area, the municipality in the town of Beit Lahia said in a statement early Sunday.

Swaths of residential neighbourhoods in northern Gaza have been levelled in airstrikes. UN monitors say more than half of northern Gaza’s remaining residents, estimated at around 300,000, are sheltering in UN-run facilities. But deadly Israeli strikes have also repeatedly hit and damaged those shelters. The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has said it has lost contact with many in the north.

The UN said about 1.5 million people in Gaza, or 70 percent of the population, have fled their homes. Food, water and the fuel needed for generators that power hospitals and other facilities are running out.