Israel bombs Gaza as UN warns territory 'uninhabitable'

Israel bombed Gaza on Saturday as the United Nations warned the Palestinian territory has become "uninhabitable" after three months of fighting that threatens to engulf the wider region.

AFP correspondents reported Israeli strikes early Saturday on Gaza's southern city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter from the fighting.

Civilians continue to bear the brunt of the conflict, with the UN warning of a deepening humanitarian crisis as famine looms and disease spreads.

Abu Mohammed, 60, who fled to Rafah from the central Bureij refugee camp, told AFP Gaza's future was "dark and gloomy and very difficult".

With much of the territory already reduced to rubble, UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said Friday that "Gaza has simply become uninhabitable".

A picture taken from Rafah on January 6, 2024 shows smoke billowing over Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip during Israeli bombardment. PHOTO: AFP

The UN's children's agency warned that clashes, malnutrition and a lack of health services had created "a deadly cycle that threatens over 1.1 million children" in Gaza.

Israeli forces were continuing "to fight in all parts of the Gaza Strip, in the north, centre and south", military spokesman Daniel Hagari said late Friday.

Hagari said Israeli forces were maintaining a "very high state of readiness" near the border with Lebanon following the killing of a top Hamas commander in a strike in Beirut. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the strike, but a US defence official told AFP that Israel carried it out.

The war in Gaza was triggered by an unprecedented attack on Israel launched by Hamas on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of around 1,140 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

The resistance fighters also took around 250 hostages, 132 of whom remain in captivity, according to Israel, including at least 24 believed to have been killed.

In response, Israel has launched a relentless bombardment and ground invasion that have killed at least 22,600 people, most of them women and children, according to the Gaza health ministry.

AFP correspondents reported Friday that Israeli strikes had hit the southern cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah as well as parts of central Gaza. A hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah reported that 35 people had been killed there.

The Israeli army said its forces had "struck over 100 targets" across Gaza in the previous 24 hours, including military positions, rocket launch sites and weapons depots.

The health ministry in Gaza said it had recorded 162 deaths over the same period.

A fighter jet bombed the central area of Bureij overnight, killing "an armed terrorist cell", the army said, after what it described as an attempted attack on an Israeli tank. The Israeli army also claimed to have “killed a number of Palestinian militants” in clashes in Khan Yunis, a city that has become a major battleground.

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Israeli troops also claimed to have uncovered tunnels under the Blue Beach Hotel in northern Gaza that had been used "by terrorists as shelter from where they planned and executed attacks", according to the army.

AFPTV footage on Friday showed entire families, seeking safety from the violence, arriving in Rafah in overloaded cars and on foot, pushing handcarts stacked with possessions.

"We fled Jabalia camp to Maan (in Khan Yunis) and now we are fleeing from Maan to Rafah," said one woman who declined to give her name. "(We have) no water, no electricity and no food."

The Palestinian Red Crescent reported renewed shelling and drone fire in the area around Al-Amal hospital in Khan Yunis after seven displaced people, including a five-day-old baby, were killed while sheltering in the compound.

"We are facing a humanitarian catastrophe due to the spread of epidemics, with the hospital overcrowded with displaced people," said a spokesman for Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in central Gaza.

French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, meanwhile, slammed a proposal by two Israeli ministers to resettle Gazans outside the territory.

"It's not up to Israel to determine the future of Gaza, which is Palestinian land," Colonna told CNN on Friday.

Top Western diplomats were in the region as part of a fresh push to raise the flow of aid into the besieged territory and calm rising tensions.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Turkey on Saturday where he was due to discuss the Gaza war with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Blinken will also visit several Arab states before heading to Israel and the occupied West Bank next week.

During his visit, Blinken plans to discuss with Israeli leaders "immediate measures to increase substantially humanitarian assistance to Gaza", State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.

The EU's top diplomat Josep Borrell travelled to Lebanon on Friday for talks on "all aspects of the situation in and around Gaza", including escalating tensions with Israel.

Demonstrators shout slogans, brandish their weapons and wave Palestinian flags during a march in solidarity with the people of Gaza in the Houthi-controlled capital Sanaa. PHOTO: AFP

Germany's top diplomat, Annalena Baerbock, was also due to travel to the region, a foreign ministry spokesman said. She plans to discuss "the dramatic humanitarian situation in Gaza" and tensions on the Israel-Lebanon border, spokesman Sebastian Fischer said.

The war in Gaza and almost daily exchanges of cross-border fire between Israel and Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah group since October 7 have raised fears of a wider conflagration.

Those fears grew this week following the killing of Hamas’ deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri in Hezbollah's stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned Israel on Friday that the group would swiftly respond "on the battlefield" to Arouri's death.

Israel's military said Friday that its fighter jets had conducted fresh strikes against Hezbollah targets just across the border.