GAZA: Israeli tanks pushed deeper into districts in central and southern Gaza overnight under heavy air and artillery fire, residents said, pushes deeper into camps that has razed much of the enclave and that Israel has said may last months more.
Fighting late on Friday and early Saturday was focused in Al Bureij, Nuseirat, Maghazi and Khan Younis, backed by intensive air strikes that filled hospitals with injured Palestinians.
The bombardment has killed 100 Palestinians and injured 150 in the central Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, a senior health official in central Gaza said.
At Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the biggest and most important medical facility in the south of the tiny, crowded territory, Red Crescent images posted online showed ambulances operating amid smashed streets, carrying injured children.
Almost all of Gaza's 2.3 million residents have been forced from their homes by Israel's withering 12-week assault.
The offensive has killed at least 21,500 Palestinians, according to health authorities in Gaza, and the conflict risks spreading across the region.
Bombardment has smashed houses, apartment blocks and businesses and put hospitals out of action. On Saturday the Palestinian Culture Ministry said Israeli strikes had struck a medieval bathhouse. The old Great Mosque was hit earlier in the war.
The little aid reaching the enclave since the start of the war, when Israel imposed a near total blockade on all food, medicine and fuel, has come across the border with Egypt.
Israel has only allowed access to the south of the enclave, where it started ordering all Gaza civilians to move from October, and aid agencies have said Israeli inspections have stopped all but a small fraction of needed supplies getting in.
A Palestinian journalist working for Al Quds TV was killed along with some of his family members in an air strike on their house in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza Strip, health officials and fellow journalists said.
Gaza's government media office says 106 Palestinian journalists have been killed in the Israeli offensive.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said last week that the first 10 weeks of the war were the deadliest recorded for journalists, with the most journalists killed in a single year in one location.
Most of the journalists and media workers killed in the war were Palestinian. The report by the US-based CPJ said it was "particularly concerned about an apparent pattern of targeting of journalists and their families by the Israeli military." — AFP
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