At least 28 Palestinians were killed in Rafah early Saturday in Israeli airstrikes.

The incident reportedly occurred hours after Israel’s prime minister said he asked the military to plan for the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from the southern Gaza city ahead of a ground invasion.

According to the Associated Press (AP), Benjamin Netanyahu did not provide details or a timeline, but the announcement set off widespread panic. More than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are packed into Rafah, many after being uprooted repeatedly by Israeli evacuation orders that now cover two-thirds of Gaza’s territory. It’s not clear where they could run next.

“Word of the invasion plans capped a week of increasingly public friction between Netanyahu and the Biden administration. US [United States] officials have said an invasion of Rafah without a plan for the civilian population would lead to disaster,” the report read.

It added that Israel has carried out airstrikes in Rafah almost daily, even after telling civilians in recent weeks to seek shelter there from ground combat in the city of Khan Younis, just to the north.

According to a health official and Associated Press journalists who saw the bodies arriving at hospitals overnight into Saturday, three airstrikes on homes in the Rafah area killed 28 people.

Each strike killed multiple members of three families, including a total of 10 children, the youngest three months old.

A resident, Fadel al-Ghannam lost his son, daughter-in-law and four grandchildren in one of the strikes. While standing amid the rubble, al-Ghannam said the strike tore the bodies of his loved ones to shreds.

He feared even worse, with the looming ground invasion of Rafah and said the world’s silence has enabled Israel to proceed. “To this day, the world has not been fair to us and given us our rights,” he was quoted as saying.

In Khan Younis, the focus of the current ground combat, Israeli forces opened fire at Nasser Hospital, the area’s largest, killing at least one person and wounding several, said Ashraf al-Qidra, a spokesman for the Gaza Health Ministry.

He said medical staff are no longer able to move between the facility’s buildings because of the intense fire. He said 300 medical personnel, 450 patients and 10,000 displaced people are sheltering in the hospital.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment, the AP said.