Palestinian protesters run for cover from tear gas during clashes with Israeli security forces in the West Bank.

An Israeli air strike on central Gaza early Saturday has claimed the lives of at least five Palestinians of the same family, medical officials said according to Agence France-Presse.

An Israeli air strike hit a house in central Gaza before dawn on Saturday killing five family members, including two women and two children, Palestinian medics said.

Emergency services initially said three people were killed and five wounded, but later announced that two people had died of their injuries after the raid in Al-Zawayda near the Nusseirat refugee camp.

The air raid hit a family home, witnesses and medics said.

Doctors at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah said the five dead all came from the same family — a 28-year-old father, his 26-year-old wife and their two boys aged three and four.

The father’s 45-year-old aunt was also killed, they said.

The attack comes as the bloody conflict between Hamas and Israel entered its 47th day, killing at least 2,095 Palestinians, and 68 people on the Israeli side, all but four of them soldiers.

Hostilities in the six-week war between Israel and Islamist rulers of Gaza Hamas resumed on Tuesday as Egyptian-brokered truce talks collapsed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday vowed harsh retribution against Hamas, after a mortar round fired from the Palestinian territory killed an Israeli child.

“Hamas will pay a heavy price for this attack,” Netanyahu’s spokesman Ofir Gendelman cited the prime minster as saying on his Twitter account, adding that the Israeli army and Shin Bet internal security service would “intensify ops against Hamas until the goal of #ProtectiveEdge is achieved”.

The 4-year-old Israeli boy is the first Israeli child killed in the conflict between Israel and Gaza-based Palestinian factions since the beginning of Israel’s operation “Protective Edge” against the Palestinian enclave on July 8.

 
[wpResize]