Battles were raging in Gaza early on Saturday, as Israel expanded its ground operations and cut communications to Gaza.
Israeli air strikes destroyed hundreds of buildings in the Gaza Strip overnight, the civil defense service in the Palestinian territory said on Saturday.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk warned on Saturday there was the potential for thousands more civilians to die as Israel presses a ground operation in Gaza.
"Given the manner in which military operations have been conducted until now, in the context of the 56-year-old occupation, I am raising alarm about the possibly catastrophic consequences of large-scale ground operations in Gaza and the potential for thousands more civilians to die," Turk said.
"There is no safe place in Gaza and there is no way out. I am very worried for my colleagues, as I am for all civilians in Gaza."
The health ministry in Gaza said Israeli strikes had killed 7,703 people, mainly civilians, including more than 3,500 children.
The UN rights chief condemned the Internet and telecommunications blackout that has hit the Palestinian enclave since Friday.
"Compounding the misery and suffering of civilians, Israeli strikes on telecommunications installations and subsequent Internet shutdown have effectively left Gazans with no way of knowing what is happening across Gaza and cut them off from the outside world," he said.
"Ambulances and civil defense teams are no longer able to locate the injured, or the thousands of people estimated to be still under the rubble.
"When these hostilities end, those who have survived will face the rubble of their homes and the graves of their family members," Turk said.
He called on all parties "to do all in their power to de-escalate the conflict".
"Hundreds of buildings and houses were completely destroyed and thousands of other homes were damaged," Mahmud Bassal, a spokesman for the Gaza Civil Defence told AFP, adding that the intense bombardments had changed the landscape of northern Gaza.
Israeli military spokesman Major Nir Dinar told AFP. "Our troops are operating inside Gaza as they did yesterday." With tens of thousands of troops massed along the Gaza border ahead of an expected full-blown invasion, Israeli forces also made limited ground incursions on Wednesday and Thursday nights. "Following the series of strikes of the last days, the ground forces are extending the ground operations tonight," military spokesman Daniel Hagari told reporters Friday.
- 'Why are they bombing us? - AFP live footage late Friday showed air strike after air strike light up the night sky of northern Gaza as thick black smoke clouded the horizon. In a bombed-out street in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood, 50-year-old Om Walid Basal asked why her apartment block had been bombed by Israel.
"This was our house, we lived here just with our children, it was full of children," she said.
"Why are they bombing us? Why are they destroying our homes?"
The health ministry said Friday that Israeli strikes on Gaza had now killed 7,326 people, more than 3,000 of them children. Hamas earlier said it was "ready" for an invasion. "If (Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu decides to enter Gaza tonight, the resistance is ready," Ezzat al-Rishaq, a senior member of the Hamas political bureau, said on Telegram. "The remains of his soldiers will be swallowed up by the land of Gaza."
- Internet cut -
Hamas said all internet connections and communications across Gaza had been cut, and accused Israel of taking the measure "to perpetrate massacres with bloody retaliatory strikes from the air, land and sea".
Human Rights Watch also warned that the near-total telecommunications blackout in Gaza risks providing cover for "mass atrocities". The Palestinian Red Crescent meanwhile said ambulance services had been disrupted. "We have completely lost contact with the operations room in the Gaza Strip and all our teams operating there," it said on X.
Hamas pledged to confront Israeli attacks with full force after Israel's military widened its air and ground attacks on the Palestinian enclave, suggesting on Saturday that the ground offensive had begun.
Israel said on Saturday morning its troops, sent in on Friday night, were still in the field, without elaborating.
Israel said it would allow trucks carrying food, water, and medicine to enter Gaza on Saturday, indicating that bombing might pause, at least in the area of its border with Egypt where small amounts of aid have been arriving.
The head of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the blackout was "making it impossible" for ambulances to reach the injured in Gaza. "Evacuation of patients is not possible under such circumstances, nor to find safe shelter," he said in a post on X.
He said also the WHO was not able to contact its staff and health facilities. The
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