GAZA: Israel launched an assault overnight on Gaza's main northern city weeks after pulling back from there, residents said.
Inside Gaza, air strikes on neighbourhoods across Gaza City killed and wounded many people. While tanks shelled the eastern areas of the city, naval boats fired shells and gun rounds at the beachfront areas in the west, they said.
Israel said late last year that it had largely completed operations in northern Gaza. The push back into Gaza City, where residents reported fierce gun battles near the main Al-Shifa hospital, indicated that the war was not going to plan.
Among those killed were two Palestinian journalists, Essam El-lulu and Hussein Attalah, along with several members of their families, health officials and the journalist union said.
Gazans said the renewed violence made a mockery of a ruling by the World Court calling on Israel to do more to help civilians. Health officials say more than 26,637 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict with thousands more bodies likely under the rubble of destroyed buildings across the coastal territory.
"The war continues in a dirtier manner," said Gaza City resident Mustafa Ibrahim, a Palestinian human rights activist now displaced with his family in Rafah near the southern border with Egypt, along with more than a million other Gazans.
Israel ordered new evacuations of the most populated areas of Gaza City, but people said communications blackouts meant many would miss them.
People in the north have been grinding animal feed to make flour after flour, rice and sugar ran out, part of an aid crisis now exacerbated by a withdrawal of support for the United Nations' aid agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
The United States and another major donor, Germany, are among countries to have suspended aid to the agency since Friday after Israel said 12 of UNRWA's 13,000 staff in Gaza were involved in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.
UNRWA, which says more than 150 of its staff have been killed since October, said it would have to end operations within a month if funding was not restored.
Air strikes also hit the southern city of Khan Younis. Israel said that four among dozens of Palestinian gunmen it had killed in the past 24 hours had been preparing to ambush troops near Al-Amal hospital.
People fled south on foot carrying children and bedding. Suleiman Abusari, in a wheelchair pushed by his father, said his legs were amputated after an Israeli drone hit him.
In the middle of Gaza, health officials said 13 Palestinians were killed in the Al-Rimal Neighborhood after Israeli forces stormed a shelter for displaced people. — Reuters
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