GAZA: Israeli forces pushed deep into the ruins of Gaza's northern edge on Monday to recapture an area where they claimed to have dismantled Palestinian groups months ago, while in the south tanks and troops pushed across a highway into Rafah.
Some of the most intense fighting for weeks is raging in both the north and south. Israeli operations in Rafah, which borders Egypt, have closed a main crossing point for aid, which humanitarian groups say is worsening an already dire situation.
Hundreds of thousands of people are being forced to flee again after around half of Gaza's population took sanctuary there after being pushed south by fighting elsewhere.
Gaza's health authority on Monday appealed for international pressure to reopen access via the southern border to allow in aid and medical supplies.
"The wounded and sick suffer a slow death because there is no treatment and supplies and they cannot travel," it said.
In northern Gaza's Jabalia, a sprawling refugee camp built 75 years ago to house Palestinian refugees from what is now Israel, tanks pushed towards the heart of the district.
Residents fled along rubble-strewn streets carrying bags of belongings. Tank shells landed in the centre of the camp and airstrikes destroyed clusters of houses, they said. Health officials said they had recovered 20 bodies of Palestinians killed in overnight airstrikes.
"We don't know where to go. We have been displaced from one place to the next... We are running in the streets. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw the tank and the bulldozer. It is on that street," said one woman, who did not give her name.
Palestinians say the need to return to earlier battlegrounds is proof Israel's military objectives are unattainable.
The Palestinian death toll in the war has now surpassed 35,000, with 57 killed in the past 24 hours, according to Gaza health officials, whose figures do not differentiate between civilians and fighters.
The fighting has laid waste to the enclave and caused a deep humanitarian crisis, with the Gaza health ministry warning on Monday that the medical system is on the verge of collapse due to a shortage of fuel to power generators and ambulances.
In Rafah, Israel stepped up aerial and ground bombardments on the eastern areas of the city, killing people in an airstrike on a house in the Brazil neighbourhood.
Residents said Israeli air and ground bombardments were intensifying and tanks had cut off the main north-south Salahuddin Road dividing east of the city from the central area. — Reuters
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