Israel bombarded towns across Gaza with air strikes on Wednesday, killing dozens of Palestinians, as talks over securing another truce and captive-prisoner exchange with Hamas continue.

At least 46 people were killed and more than 100 wounded after Israel bombarded the urban Jabalia refugee camp near Gaza City, according to Munir al-Bursh, a senior Palestinian health ministry official.

In southern Gaza, several women and children were among those brought into Nasser hospital in the city of Khan Younis after the strikes.

Gaza’s health ministry also said at least 12 people were killed and dozens were wounded in a series of air strikes in Rafah, near the border with Egypt.

“Twelve martyrs and dozens of wounded, including women and children, were recovered from under the rubble when a house and a mosque were targeted hundreds of metres from Kuwaiti hospital,” the ministry said in a statement.

The Israeli military also ordered the immediate evacuation of an area covering some 20 percent of central and southern Khan Younis city, which before Israel’s invasion was home to more than 111,000 people and now includes 32 shelters housing more than 141,000 people displaced from northern Gaza by the war.

Israel’s notification of the forced relocation was announced online on Wednesday, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA), with Palestinians instructed to move to the already overcrowded neighbourhoods in Rafah, further south.

Meanwhile, Hamas’s top leader Ismail Haniyeh travelled to Cairo on Wednesday for talks on the war in Gaza, part of a flurry of diplomacy amid hopes of securing another truce and captive-swap deal with Israel.

Both sides have recently relaunched indirect talks, mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the United States.

More than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began its war on Gaza on October 7. Thousands more lie buried under the rubble of Gaza, the UN estimates.