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Hamas has this afternoon launched a fresh wave of rocket attacks across southern Israel, including a child development centre, even as Gaza holds its breath with Israel's Defence Forces massing hundreds of thousands of troops on its border.
Shocking images and videos out of Israel's southern city of Ashkelon purportedly showed how the Child Development wing of the Barzilai Medical Centre suffered a direct hit which reduced parts of the building to rubble.
A spokeswoman for the centre said: 'The child development centre at the Barzilai hospital in Ashkelon suffered a direct hit by a projectile from Gaza,' while Deputy Director Dr. Gili Givati told Israeli public radio: 'The development centre was completely destroyed.'
The strike was just one of many launched by the armed wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who declared they were targeting multiple locations in southern and central Israel with rockets, as sirens sounded in areas surrounding the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later shared a harrowing image of a child's bed with its sheets soaked in blood, along with the caption: 'Hamas is worse than ISIS.'