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More than fifty people have been killed in an explosion at the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. The director of the hospital in the refugee camp told Al Jazeera. According to the director, this is not yet the total number of victims and the count is still ongoing.

“It’s a massive carnage. It’s hard to count how many buildings have been destroyed here,” Al Jazeera reporter Anas Sharif said at the scene. Residents of the camp try to rescue others from the rubble. Others stand beside it and weep.

“Hundreds of civilians lived in these buildings,” a ministry spokesman told reporters in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, calling it the “latest massacre by the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip.”

Ragheb Akal, who lives in Jabaliya, describes this afternoon’s bombing of the refugee camp as an “earthquake” that shook the entire camp. “I went there and saw the devastation. Houses and body parts buried under the rubble, martyrs and lots of injuries,” Akal told AFP reporters.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Interior, it was an Israeli air force bombing that killed and injured over 400 people. “It is not an exaggeration when they talk about hundreds of martyrs and injured,” Akal said. He says people are still busy carrying away the bodies of the victims, including children, women and the elderly.

Video footage from the AFP news agency shows the bodies of 47 people who did not survive the blast. A local hospital earlier said more than 50 deaths had been reported. The Israeli military has yet to respond.

Martin Albers