ISRAELI forces massacred at least 19 Palestinians during an air strike on a crowded tent camp in Gaza early today.

Palestinian officials said that about 60 others were wounded during the attack.

The Gaza Health Ministry revised down original estimates that at least 40 had been killed.

The attack came a day after Palestinian representatives at the United Nations circulated proposals for Israel to get out of Gaza and the West Bank in six months.

The Israelis said that the attack in Muwasi was targeted at “significant” Hamas fighters. 

Hamas denied any of its fighters were in the area, calling the Israeli allegations a “blatant lie.”

Muwasi is a crowded camp of tents along the Gaza coast that Israel designated as a humanitarian zone for hundreds of thousands of civilians to seek shelter.

Gaza’s Civil Defence said that entire families were wiped out in their tents.

Social media images showed three large craters at the scene, where first responders and displaced people were sifting through the sand and rubble with garden tools and their bare hands by the light of mobile phones. 

Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, one of three hospitals to receive casualties, said that about two dozen bodies were brought in from the strike. 

Samar Moamer told reporters at the hospital where she was being treated for injuries: “We were sleeping and suddenly it was like a tornado.”

She said that one of her daughters was killed and the other was pulled alive from the rubble.

Palestinian journalist Hamza Yusuf asked on the X social media site: “How many more tent massacres is the world going to let Israel get away with?”

United Nations secretary-general Antonio Manuel de Oliveira Guterres said on Monday that ”the level of suffering we are witnessing in Gaza is unprecedented in my mandate as secretary-general of the UN.”

He said: “I’ve never seen such a level of death and destruction as we are seeing in Gaza in the last few months.”

His comments came as the Palestinians circulated a draft UN resolution demanding that Israel end its “unlawful presence” in Gaza and the West Bank within six months.

The proposed general assembly resolution follows a ruling by the top UN court in July that said Israel’s presence in the Palestinian territories is unlawful and must end.

Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon denounced the resolution and described it as a “reward for terrorism.”

“Let it be clear: nothing will stop Israel or deter it from its mission to bring home the hostages and eliminate Hamas,” he said.