Israeli forces storm Gaza hospital as strikes kill 72 across enclave

CAIRO/GAZA: Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 72 people since Thursday night and Israeli forces launched a night-time raid on a hospital in the north of the enclave, Palestinian officials said. The Gaza health ministry said a strike on houses in the southern city of Khan Younis killed at least 38, many of them women and children. The Israeli military said its forces had killed a number of Palestinian gunmen in air and ground strikes in the southern Gaza Strip and dismantled military infrastructure.

Some residents of Khan Younis sifted through rubble on Friday in an attempt to retrieve clothes and documents, while children looked for their toys. Ahmed Sobh recounted how his cousin had screamed "Help me, help me". "We ran and found her children, a boy and a girl, martyred. Her son was lying under the concrete column, it took us 1.5 hours to get him out," he told Reuters.

Ahmed al-Farra described digging relatives including his mother from the rubble, adding he had lost 15 members of his extended family during the air strikes. "As I was trying to dig (my mother) out I looked at this wall and saw a tank aiming at me. I was thinking 'shall I dig or shall I watch the tank,' what shall I do? I dug her out full of fear. Everyone was doing the same, digging in fear," he said. At the nearby Nasser Hospital, medics prepared the dead, among them three children wrapped in the same white shroud.