Gaza Strip Refugee Camp And Hospital Hit By Missiles, Killing Several Kids Playing Outside

“There is damage to every part of civilian infrastructure imaginable. Water, electricity, food, shelter, everything will need aid. It will take years for Gaza to recover.”

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Eight people, including seven children, died following missile fire on a park inside the Shati refugee camp on the edge of Gaza City, medics said. The children were playing on a swing when the strike hit the park, Ayman Sahabani, the head of the emergency room at Shifa hospital, told reporters.

"I know some of them. They were from Al-Helou family who left their homes in Shujayea (east Gaza city, where massive artillery fire destroyed neighbourhoods). They came here and rented an apartment last week," al-Derby said.

"We had no activity in the area. We know it was launched from within Gaza and landed short," Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner, an Israeli army spokesman, said.

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However, Hamas denied it had fired any rockets in the area and said it was "categorically an airstrike by Israel". It said it had collected schrapnel from the scene that it could prove was from an Israeli munition.

Medics said that an Israeli missile also hit a building, believed to be an outpatient clinic, close to the main gate of Shifa hospital, the same hospital where the victims of the playground strike were taken. Al Jazeera's Imtiaz Tyab, reporting from the hospital, said there were chaotic scenes as "a number of small bodies were brought into this hospital".

At least another five Palestinians, including three children, were killed in other attacks on Monday. A four-year-old boy died when tank shells hit his family's house in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip, Gaza health officials said. Another person was killed by tank shelling in a separate incident, also in Jabalia.

The United Nations on Monday called for an "immediate" ceasefire in the fighting that has already killed more than 1,040 Palestinians, 43 Israeli soldiers and three civilians on the Israeli side. But Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, warned Israelis later that evening to "be prepared for a lengthy campaign" after four soldiers were killed in a mortar attack at Eshkol in southern Israel.

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"Israeli citizens cannot live with the threat from rockets and from death tunnels - death from above and from below," Netanyahu said in a speech broadcast live, soon after the news of the shelling of the Eshkol region that also reportedly wounded at least 12 people. The military said at least a dozen rockets had been fired from Gaza at Israel since midnight

Palestinian families huddled inside their homes, fearing more airstrikes, while those who came to a cemetery in Gaza City's Sheik Radwan neighbourhood to pay traditional respects at their ancestors' graves gathered around a large crater from an airstrike a week ago that had broken up several graves. Amid an eerie calm, the call to Eid prayer echoed in the southern town of Rafah on Monday morning. Dozens of worshippers lined the rows of a severely destroyed mosque, with a collapsed roof and missing walls. Many of the faithful looked sombre during the traditional holiday sermon.

In Gaza City, dozens of men prayed in the courtyard of a UN school surrounded by school desks. Children and women stood on a higher level overlooking the worshippers. "We are suffering and will suffer but we need our rights, our houses, our lands and our farms to return to us and we will not accept living a miserable life," said Abu Saber Jalees, who fled fighting to seek shelter at the school.

He accused both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal of being "morally wrong" for allowing the civilian deaths. He said "Gaza is in critical condition" after the bombardment by Israeli forces that has killed hundreds of residents and raised "serious questions about proportionality".

The war, now in its 21st day, has killed more than 1,030 Palestinians, mainly civilians, according to the Palestinian health ministry. More than 220 children have reportedly died. Israel has lost 43 soldiers, as well as two Israeli civilians and a Thai worker killed by rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza, according to the Israeli military.

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Mental health experts say PTSD particularly affects Gaza’s children. With over 40 percent of the population under the age of 15, hundreds of thousands of children are currently living with PTSD. After Israel’s last offensive in 2012, the PTSD rate among children in Gaza doubled, according to the United Nation’s agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). “Doctors are still working with children who were traumatized in 2012, and those who were traumatized in the 2008 war. Now everything is being brought back again, the bombings, the airstrikes, the insecurity,” said Farid Zahalka, a doctor who works with the U.N. “It is trauma upon trauma.”

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