GAZA CITY, Palestine

The Israeli army launched dozens of fresh airstrikes on security sites and residential areas in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday.

The air raids, the most violent since the start of the violence, targeted several areas in the northern Gaza Strip and the southern cities of Rafah and Khan Younis.

According to an Anadolu Agency reporter, the attacks also targeted Burj Al-Sousi, a tower opposite the headquarters of the UN refugee agency UNRWA in the central Gaza Strip.

“Israeli occupation planes launched successive raids that resulted in the destruction of all police headquarters buildings in Gaza City,” a spokesman for the Hamas-led Interior Ministry said in a brief statement.

He said two sites belonging to resistance factions west of Gaza City were also attacked. No information is yet available about casualties.

Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra, for his part, warned that the deliberate targeting of residential neighborhoods puts more than half of Gaza’s population, including children and women, in a state of panic.

Meanwhile, the Israeli army said on Twitter that over 1,050 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel in the last 38 hours, adding that most of them were intercepted by Israel’s air defense system.

At least 39 Palestinians have been killed and 220 others injured in Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Five Israelis have also been killed and 45 others injured in Palestinian rocket fire.

Tensions have been running high since last week after an Israeli court ordered the evictions of Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.

*Writing by Ibrahim Mukhtar in Ankara