Nurse killed with his wife and five children as Israel escalates bombing campaign in Gaza

A wave of deadly strikes in northern Gaza has marked a significant escalation in Israel's offensive.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said on Friday evening it was "conducting extensive strikes and mobilising troops to achieve operational control in the areas of Gaza". Earlier, it said it had struck "over 150 terror targets" across the Gaza Strip in the previous 24 hours - an average of one airstrike every 10 minutes.

Israeli strikes on Gaza have killed more than 250 people since Thursday morning, the Hamas-run health ministry in the region said on Friday. Nurse and his family killed in strike The impact of this new bombardment is cataclysmic, as this video of an Israeli airstrike in Jabalia, northern Gaza, verified by Sky News, shows.

Other videos show huge smoke clouds rising from airstrikes on residential neighbourhoods surrounding the city's Indonesian Hospital. The hospital's director, Dr Marwan al Sultan, told Sky News: "There is a shortage of everything except death." Among those killed in Jabalia on Friday was 42-year old Yahya Shehab, a nurse for the Palestine Children's Relief Fund (PCRF).

He was killed alongside his wife Tamara, 37, and their five children: Sarah, 18, Anas, 16, Maryam, 14, Aya, 12 and Abdul, 11. He is survived by his niece Huda, 27, a civil engineer, who lives nearby with her husband Ahmad Ngat, 31, and their two young sons, Mohammed, seven, and Yusuf, four.

Ahmad remembers Yahya as kind and generous, and that he would use his skills as a nurse to treat Mohammed and Yusuf whenever they were sick. "His kids were great too," Ahmad says.

"May God have mercy on them." Operation Gideon Chariot An Israeli official said Friday's strikes were preparatory actions in the lead-up to a larger operation. Earlier this month, Israel's security cabinet approved "Operation Gideon Chariot" - a plan to "capture" all of Gaza and force its entire population to move to a small enclave in the southern Gaza Strip.

At the time, a defence official said the operation would go ahead if no hostage deal was reached by the end of US President Donald Trump's visit to the Middle East. That visit ended on Friday 16 May.

???? Follow Trump100 on your podcast app ???? Hamas had proposed releasing all hostages in exchange for a permanent end to the war. Last month, Hamas turned down Israel's offer of a temporary ceasefire in exchange for the militant group laying down its weapons and releasing half the living hostages.

Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who sits in the security cabinet, said of Operation Gideon Chariot that Gaza would be "entirely destroyed.