At least 12 people have been killed in fresh Israeli attacks in parts of Gaza City, Palestinian medics said on Saturday.
The Israeli military said airstrikes hit targets in Shejaiya, a neighbourhood in the east of Gaza City, including cells of militants who were about to attack Israeli soldiers.
Ground troops also took action against gunmen above ground and in tunnels, the military said, adding that large quantities of weapons and ammunition were found in the operations.
Palestinian medics and witnesses said children were among those who died in Gaza City. The official Palestinian WAFA news agency said residential buildings were hit.
The accounts of the fighting in Gaza could not be independently confirmed.
Israel's army had called on the residents of several neighbourhoods in Gaza City, in the north of the strip, to flee on Thursday, in what is usually a sign of imminent new Israeli military operations.
They were told to go to a designated "humanitarian zone" in the south of the territory. However, after almost nine months of war, the humanitarian conditions in the zones designated as safe are catastrophic and civilians are often not protected there either.
At the beginning of the year, Israel had described the north of the Gaza Strip as largely secure and Hamas there as decisively weakened. In the meantime, however, the Islamist terrorist group has apparently regrouped.
