Israeli shelling and airstrikes killed at least 37 people, most of them sheltering in tents, outside the southern Gaza city of Rafah overnight and on Tuesday.

The airstrikes pummeled the same area where strikes triggered a deadly fire days earlier in a camp for displaced Palestinians — according to witnesses, emergency workers and hospital officials.

The tent camp inferno has drawn widespread international outrage, including from some of Israel’s closest allies, over the military’s expanding offensive into Rafah, Associated Press reported.

And in a sign of Israel’s growing isolation on the world stage, Spain, Norway and Ireland formally recognized a Palestinian state on Tuesday.

The Israeli military suggested Sunday’s blaze in the tent camp may have been caused by secondary explosions, possibly from Palestinian militants’ weapons.

The results of Israel’s initial probe into the fire were issued Tuesday, with military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari saying the cause of the fire was still under investigation but that the Israeli munitions used — targeting what the army said was a position with two senior Hamas militants — were too small to be the source, AP reported.

The strike or the subsequent fire could also have ignited fuel, cooking gas canisters or other materials in the camp. The blaze killed 45 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials’ count. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the fire was the result of a “tragic mishap.”

On Tuesday afternoon, an Israeli drone strike hit tents near a field hospital by the Mediterranean coast west of Rafah, killing at least 21 people, including 13 women, Gaza’s Health Ministry said.

A witness, Ahmed Nassar, said his four cousins and some of their husbands and children were killed in the strike and a number of tents were destroyed or damaged. Most of those living there had fled from the same neighborhood in Gaza City earlier in the war.

“They have nothing to do with anything,” he said.

Netanyahu has vowed to press ahead in Rafah, saying Israeli forces must enter the city to dismantle Hamas and return hostages taken in the Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war.

He said Israeli warplanes used the smallest bombs possible — two munitions with 17-kilogram warheads. “Our munition alone could not have ignited a fire of this size,” he said.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said two medical facilities in Tel al-Sultan are out of service because of intense bombing nearby. Medical Aid for Palestinians, a charity operating throughout the territory, said the Tel al-Sultan medical center and the Indonesian Field Hospital were under lockdown with medics, patients and displaced people trapped inside.

Most of Gaza’s hospitals are no longer functioning. Rafah’s Kuwait Hospital shut down Monday after a strike near its entrance killed two health workers.

An Israeli airstrike triggered a fire that killed 45 people in a tent camp in the Gazan city of Rafah, officials said on Monday, prompting an outcry from global leaders who urged the implementation of a World Court order to halt Israel’s assault.

Palestinian families rushed to hospitals to prepare their dead for burial after a strike late on Sunday night set tents and rickety metal shelters ablaze, Reuters reported.

Israel’s military, which is trying to eliminate Hamas in Gaza, said it was investigating reports that a strike it carried out against commanders of the Islamist militant group in Rafah had caused the fire.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the strike had not been intended to cause civilian casualties.

“In Rafah, we already evacuated about 1 million non-combatant residents and despite our utmost effort not to harm non-combatants, something unfortunately went tragically wrong,” he said in a speech in parliament that was interrupted by shouting from opposition lawmakers.

Survivors said families were preparing to sleep when the strike hit the Tel Al-Sultan neighbourhood where thousands were sheltering after Israeli forces began a ground offensive in the east of Rafah over two weeks ago.

“We were praying… and we were getting our children’s beds ready to sleep. There was nothing unusual, then we heard a very loud noise, and fire erupted around us,” said Umm Mohamed Al-Attar, a Palestinian mother in a red headscarf.

“All the children started screaming… The sound was terrifying; we felt like the metal was about to collapse on us, and shrapnel fell into the rooms.”

Video footage obtained by Reuters showed a fire raging in the darkness and people screaming in panic. A group of young men tried to haul away sheets of corrugated iron and a hose from a single fire truck began to douse the flames.

More than half of the dead were women, children, and elderly people, health officials in Hamas-run Gaza said, adding that the death toll was likely to rise from people with severe burns.

Medics later said an Israeli airstrike on Monday on a house in Rafah had killed seven Palestinians, with several others wounded.

Israel’s military said Sunday’s strike, based on “precise intelligence”, had eliminated Hamas’ chief of staff for the second and larger Palestinian territory, the West Bank, plus another official behind deadly attacks on Israelis.

That followed the interception of eight rockets fired towards Israel from the Rafah area in Gaza’s southern tip.

More than 2,000 people could be buried alive by a massive landslide in Papua New Guinea last week, the government said on Monday, as treacherous terrain and the difficulty of getting aid to the site raises the risk that few survivors will be found.

The National Disaster Centre raised the number suspected buried to 2,000 in a letter to the U.N. released on Monday but dated Sunday.

A separate U.N. agency put the possible death toll much lower, at more than 670 people.

The variance reflects the remote site and the difficulty getting an accurate population estimate. PNG’s last credible census was in 2000 and many people live in isolated mountainous villages.

The landslide crashed through Yambali village in the country’s north at around 3 a.m. on Friday while most of the community slept.

More than 150 houses were buried beneath debris almost two stories high. Rescuers told local media they heard screams from beneath the earth.

“I have 18 of my family members being buried under the debris and soil that I am standing on, and a lot more family members in the village I cannot count,” resident Evit Kambu told Reuters. “But I cannot retrieve the bodies so I am standing here helplessly.”

Heavy equipment and aid has been slow to arrive due to the remote location while tribal warfare nearby has forced aid workers to travel in convoys escorted by soldiers and return to the provincial capital, roughly 60 km away, at night.

The first excavator only reached the site late on Sunday, according to a U.N. official. Six bodies have been retrieved so far.

Contact with other parts of the country is difficult due to patchy reception and limited electricity at the site, Reuters reported.

Even when rescue teams can get to the site, rain, unstable ground and flowing water is making it extremely dangerous for residents and rescue teams to clear debris, according to Serhan Aktoprak, the chief of the U.N. migration agency’s mission in PNG.