Israeli forces intensified it's Gaza assault, fighting Hamas through shell-blasted buildings in the north of the strip Thursday as the plight of civilians in the besieged Palestinian territory worsened.
Gaza residents said Israeli troops were inching their way closer to the Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza's biggest health facility, where Israel claims Hamas has a command center. Thousands of Palestinians have taken refuge there from the relentless Israeli bombardments.
The United Nations human rights chief called for a cease-fire and said blamed both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes in the month of fighting.
In Paris, officials from about 80 countries and organizations called for an immediate cease-fire as they met to coordinate humanitarian aid to Gaza and find ways to help wounded civilians escape the siege.
Residents in Gaza City said Israeli tanks were stationed around the city while both sides reported inflicting heavy casualties on one another in intense street battles.
Israel unleashed its assault on Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas incursion on southern Israel.
Palestinian officials said 10,569 Gaza residents had been killed as of Wednesday, about 40% of them children, while a humanitarian crisis has gripped the enclave, with basic supplies running out and buildings demolished by unrelenting Israeli bombardments.
Israel, which has vowed to destroy Hamas, says 33 of its soldiers have been killed in its ground operation as they advanced into the heart of Gaza City.
It claimed Wednesday to have secured a Hamas stronghold in Jabalia in northern Gaza after 10 hours of combat.
Thousands of Palestinians have sought refuge at Al-Shifa hospital inside Gaza City despite Israel's orders to evacuate the area it has encircled. They are sheltering in tents in the hospital grounds and say they have nowhere else to go.
The U.N. humanitarian office OCHA said the Israeli military had again told residents of the north to move southward, opening a four-hour corridor for the fifth consecutive day. About 50,000 people left the area Wednesday, it said.
Clashes and shelling around the main road continued, it said endangering evacuees. Corpses were lying alongside the road, while most evacuees were moving on foot as the Israeli military had told them to leave vehicles at the southern edge of Gaza city, it said.
Huge numbers of displaced people from among Gaza's 2.3 million population are already crammed into schools, hospitals and other sites in the south.
Although the fighting is concentrated in the north, southern areas have also come under regular attack. In Khan Younis, Gaza's main southern city, residents picked through the rubble and twisted debris of a building destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, hoping to find survivors, on Thursday morning, witnesses said.
"As deaths and injuries in Gaza continue to rise due to intensified hostilities, intense overcrowding and disrupted health, water, and sanitation systems pose an added danger: the rapid spread of infectious diseases," the World Health Organization said.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, on Wednesday called for an immediate cease-fire – which Israel and its main ally the United States have consistently rejected as benefiting Hamas.
"The collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians is also a war crime, as is unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians," he said after condemning the Hamas incursion.
A conference in Paris on Thursday, attended by Arab nations, Western powers, G-20 members and NGO groups such as Doctors Without Borders discussed measures to alleviate the suffering in Gaza, but without a pause in fighting expectations are low.
Among the options discussed were setting up a maritime corridor, potentially to use sea lanes to ship humanitarian aid into Gaza or evacuate the wounded.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has crossed the region on a diplomatic mission, on Wednesday outlined Washington's expectations for Gaza when the conflict ends. He pushed back at Israeli comments that it would be responsible for security in Gaza indefinitely.
There should be "no reoccupation of Gaza after the conflict ends. No attempt to blockade or besiege Gaza. No reduction in the territory of Gaza," Blinken said at a press conference in Tokyo.
Blinken said there may be a need for "some transition period" at the end of the conflict, but that post-crisis Gaza must "include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority."
The Palestinian Authority (PA), which exercises limited self-rule in parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, says the Gaza Strip, where Hamas has ruled since 2007, is an integral part of what it envisions for a future Palestinian state.
Israeli officials have said they do not intend to occupy Gaza after the war, but have yet to articulate how they might ensure security. Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza in 2005.
