The Israeli military said overnight that ground troops backed by airstrikes have launched an operation in central Gaza's Bureij refugee camp.
Local hospital officials say a strike on a home in the camp killed 11 Palestinians, including three children and one woman.
A strike on another house in the neighboring Maghazi refugee camp killed two men, according to officials at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the nearby town of Deir al-Balah, where the casualties were taken.
The extent of the Israeli incursion into the Bureij camp was not immediately clear as of Tuesday evening local time. The military said in a statement that it was conducting "a precision operation" in the camp targeting Hamas positions.
Israeli forces have been battling militants in parts of Gaza that the army said it wrested control of months ago — potential signs of a simmering insurgency.
The military waged an offensive earlier this year for several weeks in Bureij and several other nearby refugee camps in central Gaza.
Troops pulled out of the Jabaliya camp in northern Gaza last Friday after weeks of fighting caused widespread destruction.
First responders have recovered the bodies of 360 people, mostly women and children, killed during the battles.
Israel has also expanded its almost month-long ground offensive in Gaza's southernmost city of Rafah.
Civilians flee in Rafah as Israel pushes ahead with its offensive
More than one million Palestinians have fled Rafah, mostly into tent camps that have arisen across central and southern Gaza.
Refugee camps in Gaza originally housed Palestinians who were driven from their homes in what is now Israel in the 1948 war surrounding Israel's founding.
Over the decades since, they have been built up into crowded urban districts.
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