GAZA STRIP (Dispatches) -- At least 25 Palestinians, including women and children, were martyred in Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip on Saturday, the Palestinian health ministry said.
The new slaughters came as Gaza marked the grim milestone of 400 days of relentless Israeli death and destruction.
One of the strikes targeted a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza City’s eastern Tuffah neighborhood, killing six people from two families - including a pregnant woman and children - and wounding 22 others.
Another Israeli airstrike hit tents housing displaced Palestinians in Al-Mawasi, in the southern region of Khan Younis, killing at least nine people and injuring 11 others.
Four more Palestinians were killed in two separate attacks on the northern town of Beit Lahia.
Palestinian health authorities said that at least 44 people had been martyred in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza last year to 43,552.
On Friday, UNICEF said it had registered at least 64 attacks - almost two every day - on schools sheltering Palestinian families in Gaza during October.
UNICEF also reported that “more than 95 percent of schools in Gaza have been partially or completely destroyed” since the start of the war.
In a new report, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said women and children make up nearly 70 percent of the thousands of fatalities it had managed to verify.
The report found that children aged five to nine made up the largest group of victims, with the youngest victim being a one-day-old boy and the oldest a 97-year-old woman.
The OHCHR also found that about 80 percent of all the verified deaths in Gaza occurred during Israeli attacks on residential buildings or similar housing.
On Friday, the Famine Review Committee (FRC) issued a rare alert, warning of a strong likelihood of imminent famine in parts of northern Gaza, where Israel has imposed a blockade and has carried out a new military campaign for over a month. 
Rights groups have accused the occupying regime of Israel of using starvation as a tactic to force residents to leave northern Gaza as part of its strategy to clear the area and maintain permanent control.
On Saturday, a Gaza family sat weeping over children killed by an Israeli strike as they were getting ready to play soccer, amid an intensified bombardment.
The strike was in Mawasi, a southern coastal area where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter after Israel’s military

 told them to leave to other areas.
“The rocket struck them. There were no wanted or targeted people there and there was nobody else in the street. Just the children who were killed yesterday,” said Muhammad Zanoun, a relative of the dead children, quoted by Reuters.
On-off talks for a ceasefire and captives release deal mediated by the United States, Egypt and Qatar have made little progress and on Saturday a Qatari official said Doha would pull out of negotiations unless the two sides committed more fully.
The official said Qatar would stop trying to mediate talks until Hamas and Israel “demonstrate a sincere willingness to return to the negotiating table”.
That followed a U.S. official saying on Friday that Washington had asked Qatar to close the Hamas office in Doha after the group rejected a ceasefire proposal.
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri dismissed the report as “an American attempt to send a message of pressure to the movement through the media”.
Adding to international concerns, the conflict has expanded, with Israel also attacking Lebanon.
The UN Human Rights Office said on Friday that nearly 70% of fatalities it had verified in Gaza were women and children.  
Strikes overnight and on Saturday morning martyred four people east of Gaza City including two journalists, four in a house in Beit Lahiya, two in a tent at Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, and four in a tent in Abassan near Khan Younis, medics said.
For the past month, Israel’s main military focus has been in northern Gaza, the first part of the tiny, crowded territory that its troops overran early in the invasion last year.
A committee of global food security experts warned on Friday that there was a strong likelihood of imminent famine in northern Gaza amid the renewed fighting.