Israeli attacks in northern Gaza have killed at least 22 people, mostly women and children, as the offensive in the enclave entered its third week.

Gaza’s health ministry said 11 women and two children were among those killed in Saturday night’s attacks in the northern city of Beit Lahiya.

Another 15 people are said to have been injured.

In a separate development, a truck plowed into a bus station near Tel Aviv, killing one person and injuring more than 30.

The Ramat Hasharon attack came as Israelis were returning to work after a week-long holiday and took place outside a military base near the headquarters of Israel’s Mossad spy agency.

Israeli police said the attacker was an Arab citizen of Israel.

Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad militant group praised the attack but did not say they were behind it.

The Israeli military said there was another attack near a checkpoint in the West Bank, where a suspect tried to hit soldiers with his vehicle and then tried to stab them before being killed. No soldiers were injured, he added.

Later on Sunday, protesters disrupted a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a nationally televised ceremony commemorating the victims of last year’s Hamas attack on southern Israel.

People shouted “Shame on you” and rioted, forcing Mr Netanyahu to stop his speech. Many Israelis blame their prime minister for the failures that led to the attack and hold him responsible for not yet bringing the remaining hostages home.

In Beit Lahiya, the Israeli military said it carried out a precision strike on militants in a structure and took steps to avoid injuring civilians. He disputed what he said were “figures published by the media”.

Israel has been waging an air and ground offensive in northern Gaza for the past three weeks after it said Hamas militants had regrouped there.

Hundreds of people have been killed and tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled to Gaza City in the latest wave of displacement in the year-long war.

The Civil Defense First Response Service operating under the Hamas government in Gaza said it had recovered a number of bodies following an Israeli airstrike on Sunday on a school in the Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City.

Aid groups warned of a catastrophic situation in northern Gaza, which was the first target of Israel’s ground offensive and suffered the worst destruction of the war. Israel has severely limited the entry of basic humanitarian aid in recent weeks, and the three remaining hospitals in the north – one raided over the weekend – say they have been overwhelmed by waves of wounded.

The UN secretary-general, in a statement by his spokesman, accused Israeli authorities of refusing most aid deliveries of food and medicine amid the “appalling level of death”.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Saturday that Israeli evacuation orders and restrictions on the entry of essential supplies had left the civilian population in “horrendous circumstances”.

On Saturday, Israeli warplanes attacked Iran – which backs both Hamas and Hezbollah – in response to an Iranian ballistic missile attack earlier this month.

The cascading conflicts have raised fears of an all-out regional war pitting Israel and the United States against Iran and its militant proxies, which also include Yemen’s Houthi rebels and armed groups in Syria and Iraq.

Israel says its attacks on Gaza target only militants and blames Hamas for civilian casualties as the militants fight in densely populated areas. The military rarely comments on individual strikes, which often kill women and children.

The war began when Hamas-led militants punched holes in Israel’s border wall and stormed into southern Israel in a surprise attack in October 2023. They killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped around 250. About 100 hostages are still in Gaza, around a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, according to the local Ministry of Health. It does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its numbers, but says more than half of those killed were women and children.

The offensive devastated much of the impoverished coastal territory and displaced about 90% of the population, often multiple times. Hundreds of thousands of people have crammed into squalid tent camps along the coast, and aid groups say starvation is widespread.