Sharjah 24 - A Hamas health official said more than 80 people were killed Saturday in twin strikes on a northern Gaza refugee camp, including a UN school used as a shelter for people displaced by the Israeli war in the enclave.
Social media videos -- which AFP was unable to immediately verify -- showed bodies covered in blood and dust on the floor of a building, where mattresses had been wedged under school tables in Jabalia, the Palestinian territory's biggest refugee camp.
The army's relentless air and ground campaign has since killed 12,000 people, including 5,000 children, according to the Hamas government which has ruled Gaza since 2007.
According to UN figures, some 1.6 million people have been displaced inside Gaza by six weeks of fighting.
A separate strike Saturday on another building in Jabalia camp killed 32 people from the same family, 19 of them children, the official said. The ministry released a list of 32 members of the Abu Habal family it said had died.
Contacted by AFP, the Israeli army did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the two strikes.
Israel has told Palestinians to move from north Gaza for their safety, but deadly air strikes continued to hit central and southern areas of the narrow coastal territory.
On Saturday hundreds of people fled on foot after the director of Gaza's main hospital said the Israeli army ordered evacuation of the facility where some 2,000 people were trapped.
Columns of sick and injured -- some of them amputees -- were seen making their way out of Al-Shifa hospital towards the seafront without ambulances along with displaced people, doctors and nurses, as loud explosions were heard around the facility.
On the way, an AFP journalist saw at least 15 bodies, some in advanced stages of decomposition, along a road lined by badly damaged shops and overturned vehicles, as Israeli drones buzzed overhead.
The health ministry in the enclave said 120 wounded, along with an unspecified number of premature babies, were still at Al-Shifa hospital that has become the focus of the recent fighting.
Israel has been pressing military operations inside the hospital, searching for the Hamas operations centre it says lies under the sprawling complex -- a charge Hamas denies.
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