A ten-year-old boy and his six-year-old sister have died following an Israeli airstrike targeting a Hamas military base in Gaza.

The boy - Yassin Abu Khoussa - was killed when shrapnel hit a nearby shelter. He is reported to have been sleeping at the time of the attack.

A spokesperson for the Health Ministry in Gaza said the boy's six-year-old sister later died in hospital.

Another sibling was also injured in the incident, which led to the collapse of the family's prefabricated shelter.

Quoted in the New York Times, the children's father Suleiman Abu Khoussa described the scene, saying “their mother was screaming, ‘The children are dead, the children are dead... I went and I saw them covered in blood.”

The airstrikes were in response to several rockets fired by militants from Gaza into Israel, with a military spokesperson saying "in response to the aggression, the Israel Air Force targeted four Hamas sites in the northern Gaza Strip".

Nobody was injured by the rockets.