Gaza’s civil defence agency has said Israeli strikes killed at least 15 people across the Palestinian territory, where Israel has ramped up its military offensive in recent days.

Civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP the dead included a couple who were killed with their two young children in a pre-dawn strike on a house in the Amal quarter of the southern city of Khan Younis.

To the west of the city, at least five people were killed by a drone strike on a crowd of people that had gathered to wait for aid trucks, he said.

At Khan Younis’s Nasser Hospital, tearful mourners gathered around white-shrouded bodies outside.

“Suddenly, a missile from an F-16 destroyed the entire house, and all of them were civilians — my sister, her husband and their children,” said Wissam Al-Madhoun. “We found them lying in the street. What did this child do to (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu?”

The Israeli military said it was unable to comment on individual strikes without their “precise geographical coordinates”.