At least 50 people, a third of them children, have been killed in an Israeli strike in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahiya city, authorities said, as deadly bombardments hit the central and southern parts of the besieged Palestinian territory.

Gaza’s Government Media Office on Sunday said Israeli forces struck a multistorey residential building housing six forcibly displaced Palestinian families in Beit Lahiya.

The Ministry of Health’s Director-General Munir al-Bursh told reporters that almost 30 percent of the victims of the Beit Lahiya “massacre” were children. He said dozens of others were wounded and many more are feared trapped under the rubble.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza, said that emergency workers were unable to reach the site of the attack due to the more than 40-day-old Israeli siege of northern Gaza.

With reports of several people trapped under the rubble, the death toll is likely to rise in the coming hours.

It was not the first time Israel had hit Beit Lahiya, resulting in mass casualties. Last month, its forces bombed the Abu Nasr family residence in the city, killing at least 93 people.

On Saturday, Israel also attacked the United Nations-run Abu Assi school in the Shati refugee camp, killing 10 Palestinians and injuring 20 others, including women and children.

Last month, the Israeli army sent tanks into Beit Lahiya and the nearby towns of Beit Hanoon and Jabalia, the largest of the Gaza Strip’s eight historic refugee camps, in what it said was a campaign to fight Hamas.

Earlier on Sunday, separate Israeli air raids killed at least 17 people in the Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps in central Gaza.

The Health Ministry said on Sunday at least 43,846 Palestinians have been confirmed killed in Israeli attacks since October 7, 2023.

Meanwhile, Palestine’s Transport Minister Tariq Zourob told private sector representatives during a meeting at the Palestinian embassy in Cairo that, as a result of Israeli attacks, the damage to transport and communication infrastructure across the enclave had reached $4.8bn.

At least 300,000 tonnes of “solid waste” are reportedly on the roads across the Gaza Strip, Zourob was quoted as saying by the Palestinian news agency Wafa on Sunday.