The Israeli army announced Monday an operation was under way in Gaza's main hospital Al-Shifa, saying the complex was being used by senior Hamas militants fighters.

Soldiers "are currently conducting a precise operation in the area of the Shifa hospital," a statement from the military said.

"The operation is based on intelligence information indicating the use of the hospital by senior Hamas fighters."

Al-Shifa is the Gaza Strip's largest hospital. The Israeli army had in November last year carried out an operation in the complex, sparking an international outcry.

Witnesses in Gaza City told AFP the Al-Rimal neighbourhood, where Al-Shifa is located, had been hit by air strikes.

They also said tanks had surrounded the sprawling Al-Shifa complex.

Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of running military operations from hospitals and other medical centres, claims the group denies.

The war began when Hamas launched an unprecedented attack from Gaza on October 7 that resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures.

Vowing to destroy Hamas, Israel has carried out a relentless bombardment and ground offensive which the health ministry in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory says has killed at least 31,645 people in Gaza, most of them women and children.

At least 34 people, including two babies were killed when a contraband fuel depot exploded into flames in southern Benin near the border with Nigeria on Saturday.

According to Beninese Interior Minister Alassane Seidou, “a serious fire occurred in the town of Seme Podji. Another 20 people were seriously wounded in the incident.”

"I can't really give you the cause of the fire, but there is a large gasoline warehouse here and cars, tricycles and motorcycles come from morning to evening,” he added.

Nigeria is a main oil and gas producer where fuel smuggling is very common along its borders, particularly when the government maintains a subsidy to keep fuel prices low.

The majority of the victims were burnt and they could not be not be identified.

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).