The bodies were recovered from under bombed buildings, most of them women and children, civil defence in Gaza said.

Gaza’s Ministry of Interior said there were many casualties following an Israeli air attack late on Sunday on a residential building in the largest of eight refugee camps in the strip.

At least 27 people were also injured, with hospitals saying they are struggling to treat the wounded.

“We are suffering from an acute shortage of medicines and medical equipment,” the director of the Indonesian Hospital in North Gaza told Al Jazeera.

Israel has continued to bomb the Gaza Strip for more than two weeks in response to an incursion by Hamas on Israeli soil on October 7. The strike on the camp comes as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 4,651 and the number of injured to 14,245 since the Hamas attack, according to the besieged enclave’s health ministry.

‘We will never be safe’

The densely populated Jabalia camp is also home to three schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

Some of these schools have been converted into shelters for hundreds of displaced families.

There were also earlier bombardments of the camp by Israel. Amnesty International reports that on October 9, Israeli air attacks hit a market in the camp, one of the busiest areas in Gaza with a yet-unknown number of people killed in the attacks.

One resident of the camp who survived them says the events of the last two weeks have changed everything.

“For me,” Asmaa Tayeh, a young writer told Al Jazeera, “I believe we will never be safe even after the war is over. In fact, I will never feel free as long as Palestine is occupied and its people terrorised.”

The first shipments of aid arrived in the Gaza Strip on Saturday and Sunday but aid groups say it is a fraction of what is needed as thousands remain trapped.

Before October 7, several hundred aid trucks arrived in Gaza each day.