Israeli military strikes killed at least 40 Palestinians overnight and Friday in the Gaza Strip, doctors said, as efforts to revive ceasefire talks in Gaza received a boost with officials from the Palestinian group Hamas heading to Cairo for a new round of negotiations.

Doctors said they found 19 bodies of slain Palestinians in the northern areas of Nuseirat, one of the enclave’s eight long-standing refugee camps.

Later Friday, an Israeli airstrike killed at least 10 Palestinians in a house in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, doctors said.

Others were killed in the northern and southern areas of the Gaza Strip, doctors added. There was no new statement from the Israeli military on Friday, but it said on Thursday that its forces continued to “strike terrorist targets as part of their operational activities in the Gaza Strip.”

Israeli tanks entered the northern and western areas of Nuseirat on Thursday. They withdrew from the northern areas on Friday but remained active in the western parts of the camp. The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said its teams were unable to respond to distress calls from residents trapped in their homes.

A woman stands inside a destroyed building in Nuseirat, Gaza. Reuters

Dozens of Palestinians returned Friday to areas where the army had withdrawn to check the damage to their homes.

Doctors and relatives covered the bodies, including those of women, lying on the road with white blankets or shrouds and carried them away on stretchers.

“Forgive me, my wife, forgive me, my Ibtissam, forgive me, my dear,” a grieving man wailed in tears next to her corpse, lying on a stretcher on the ground.

Doctors said Friday that an Israeli drone killed Ahmed Al-Kahlout, head of the intensive care unit at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip, where the army operates since the beginning of October.

Contacted by Reuters, the Israeli military said it was not aware of a strike there or at that time.

Kamal Adwan Hospital is one of three medical facilities on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip that are currently barely functioning due to lack of medical supplies, fuel and food. Most of its medical staff have been arrested or expelled by the Israeli army, according to health officials.

Palestinian civil emergency services, Hamas and the official Palestinian news agency WAFA put the number of Palestinians killed in two Israeli strikes in Beit Lahiya in the past 24 hours at 70. The local health ministry did not immediately confirm the figure.

Reuters