"It was a devastating incident that we didn't expect to happen. Our army dropped 17 kilograms of explosives, the minimum amount our fighter jets can drop. Our munitions could not have caused this devastating fire by themselves," said Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari, who stressed that the investigation is still ongoing. The Israeli attack, which took place on Sunday night and reportedly targeted two senior Hamas officials, has been condemned by most of the international community and described by Israel as "a tragic accident", which happened despite "all precautions taken to avoid harming uninvolved civilians and using the minimum amount of explosives". "It was one of the hardest and most terrible nights since the offensive on Rafah began," said a displaced person in Tal al-Sultan, quoted by Spanish news agency EFE. During the early hours of the morning, Israeli artillery also fired near the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) warehouses in central Rafah, killing seven people and injuring 15, according to Palestinian medical sources. In addition, another 13 inhabitants of the Gaza Strip were killed hours later in another bombing raid, near the American field hospital between Rafah and Khan Yunis, in the south of that Palestinian territory, which has been the scene of a war between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) for the past eight months, which has been in power there since 2007. The artillery attacked with intensity and without warning this and other allegedly safe areas, from which Israel had not ordered the evacuation of the civilian population, and its tanks had already entered the centre of the city of Rafah. The government of the Gaza Strip announced that, in the last 48 hours, at least 72 displaced people were killed in Israeli bombings of makeshift tent camps in western Rafah, which were previously considered safe. "The occupiers deliberately intend to continue committing more massacres against civilians and displaced persons who have fled the horror of the murders and attacks, which confirms their insistence on premeditated and deliberate genocide, in a clear message of defiance to the international criminal courts," the Gaza government said in a statement. Israel began its military operation in Rafah on 6 May and, since then, more than one million people have fled the city, which until then was home to about 1.4 million displaced persons. The international community called on Israel not to invade the city, to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that it was essential to win the war, since four Hamas battalions remained entrenched there. At the request of Algeria, the UN Security Council today convened an emergency meeting to address the offensive in Rafah, following Sunday's attack, and Hamas urged the United Nations executive body to take "immediate action". "The international community and the Security Council must act urgently and vigorously to end these blatant violations of international law and to protect defenceless civilians," said the Palestinian Islamist movement. On 7 October last year, Israel declared war on the Gaza Strip to "eradicate" Hamas after it carried out an unprecedented attack on Israeli territory hours earlier, killing more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians. Classified as a terrorist organisation by the United States, the European Union and Israel, Hamas also took 252 hostages, 124 of whom remain in captivity and 37 have since died, according to the latest report by the Israeli army. The war, which today entered its 235th day and continues to threaten to spread throughout the Middle East region, has so far killed more than 36,000 people and injured 81,000 in the Gaza Strip, and about 10,000 have disappeared, presumably buried in the rubble, most of them civilians, according to updated figures from local authorities. The conflict has also caused nearly two million displaced persons, plunging the overcrowded and impoverished Palestinian enclave into a serious humanitarian crisis, with more than 1.1 million people in a "catastrophic hunger situation" that is causing victims - "the highest number ever recorded" by the UN in studies on food security in the world. Read also: Two more medical centres out of service in Gaza, says Hamas (Portuguese version)