Israel-Hamas war: 'Fierce battles' take over Gaza Strip; 800,000 Palestinians have fled south

Israeli forces were engaged in "fierce battles" with Hamas militants inside the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, the army said, as it continued to pummel the Palestinian territory with air and artillery strikes.

Troops are "engaged in fierce battles with Hamas deep inside the Gaza Strip," the army said in a statement, adding that dozens of militants had been killed in the past few hours.

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Forces struck "anti-tank missile launching cells and anti-tank missile launch and observation posts," the Israeli army said, adding that it had seized numerous weapons, including guns and explosives.

Hamas' armed wing said its fighters ambushed troops in Al Tawam area in northern Gaza.

Fighters "opened fire in an ambush towards invading (Israeli army) vehicles in west Tawam in the northern Gaza Strip and targeted three Zionist vehicles," Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades said in a statement.

War rages on

Israeli troops pushed deeper into Gaza on Tuesday, driving tanks and armoured bulldozers through the rubble of shattered buildings, scouring for Hamas members.

As Israel stepped up its relentless bombing of Gaza, desperate Palestinian families scrabbled through debris searching for survivors and mourned over the bodies of some of the thousands killed, draped in white shrouds.

Israeli army footage showed soldiers, who are also seeking to free at least 240 hostages, advancing through a bomb-scarred landscape, with buildings reduced to a mangled mess of stone and twisted metal by weeks of withering air and artillery strikes.

An estimated 800,000 Palestinians have fled south, even though Israeli airstrikes have pounded the entirety of the besieged enclave.

Buoyed by the first successful rescue of a captive held by Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected calls for a ceasefire and again vowed to crush Hamas' ability to govern Gaza or threaten Israel following its bloody October 7 rampage, which ignited the war.

More than half the territory's 2.3 million Palestinians have fled their homes, with hundreds of thousands sheltering in packed UN-run schools-turned-shelters or in hospitals alongside thousands of wounded patients. Israeli strikes have hit closer to several northern hospitals in recent days, alarming medics.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, says nearly 672,000 Palestinians are sheltering in its schools and other facilities — four times their capacity. Thousands of people broke into its aid warehouses over the weekend to take food, as supplies of basic goods have dwindled because of the Israeli siege.

Humanitarian crisis deepens

There has been no central electricity in Gaza for weeks, and Israel has barred the entry of fuel needed to power emergency generators for hospitals and homes.

UNRWA, which hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza rely on for basic services even in normal times, says 64 of its staff have been killed since the start of the war, including a man killed alongside his wife and eight children in a strike late Monday.

“This is the highest number ever of U.N. aid workers killed in any conflict around the world in such a short time,” spokesperson Juliette Touma told The Associated Press. “UNRWA will never be the same without these colleagues.”

Escalating conflict in the region

The war has also threatened to ignite even heavier fighting on other fronts. Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group have traded fire on a daily basis along the border, and Israel and the U.S. have struck targets in Syria linked to Iran, which supports Hamas, Hezbollah and other armed groups in the region.

The military said it shot down what appeared to be a drone near the southernmost city of Eilat and intercepted a missile over the Red Sea on Tuesday, neither of which entered Israeli airspace.

The Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen later issued a video statement claiming to have fired ballistic missiles and drones at Israel, saying it was the third such operation. They threatened to carry out more strikes “until the Israeli aggression stops.”

More than 8,500 Palestinians have been killed in the war, mostly women and minors, the Gaza Health Ministry said Monday. The figure is without precedent in decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

Over 1,400 people have died on the Israeli side, mainly civilians killed during Hamas' initial attack, also an unprecedented figure. Palestinian militants have continued firing rockets into Israel.

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