At least 43 people have been killed by Israeli strikes across Gaza since dawn on Friday, including at least 33 in the area of Gaza City in the Strip’s north, according to medical sources in the Hamas-run territory.
The figures could not be independently confirmed. The IDF did not immediately comment on the strikes reported in Gaza City, Khan Younis, Rafah and Deir El-Balah.
The reported strikes came as Israel has called on all Gaza City residents to flee south to a new “humanitarian zone” ahead of a major IDF offensive to take over the city, where the UN last month declared a famine in a report rejected by Israel.
New IDF assessments on Friday indicated that some 250,000 out of one million Palestinians who were in Gaza City have evacuated. The vast majority of Gaza’s roughly 2 million residents have been displaced at least once since the war there was sparked by the Hamas onslaught in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
The military also said Friday it was working to expand the delivery of aid into Gaza amid the efforts to facilitate the evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza City.
As part of those efforts, the military said it was working to expand Crossing 147, also known as the Kissufim Crossing, with central Gaza to allow for the increased supply of humanitarian aid.
“In recent days, IDF troops have worked to prepare and adapt the area, including paving new routes and expanding the goods terminal,” the military said.
Once the construction work is complete, the military says the crossing’s “truck intake capacity will rise to 150 trucks per day, three times the current level, thereby enabling increased entry of aid, with an emphasis on food, into the humanitarian area.”
Meanwhile, a total of nearly 280 trucks of humanitarian aid entered Gaza through the Kerem Shalom Crossing in the Strip’s south and the Zikim Crossing in the Strip’s north on Thursday, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said.
Similar amounts of aid deliveries have been reported daily over the past few weeks. The UN has said 600 trucks of aid need to be distributed each day in order to properly feed the Strip’s roughly two million people amid the war.
According to COGAT, over 350 trucks’ worth of aid were also collected for distribution by the United Nations and other international organizations from the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom and Zikim crossings on Thursday.
“The contents of hundreds of trucks are still awaiting collection on the Gazan side of the crossings,” said COGAT, which has accused the UN of hampering aid deliveries.
COGAT also said that “tankers of UN fuel entered for the operation of essential humanitarian systems” on Thursday, and that it coordinated the entry and exit of humanitarian aid workers rotating in and out of Gaza.
UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, said in a statement Friday that Israel’s new operation in Gaza City would have dire humanitarian repercussions.
According to the agency, over 10,000 children have been diagnosed with acute malnutrition in Gaza City in the past two months. “If disconnected from their treatment, there is a high risk that some of the 2,400 children being treated for severe acute malnutrition in the area could starve to death,” UNICEF said, calling for an immediate ceasefire and unimpeded humanitarian access.
Israel, which blocked the delivery of aid into Gaza for some three months until May, has blamed the humanitarian crisis in Gaza on Hamas, saying the terror group hoards aid deliveries and uses civilians as human shields.
According to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, Israel has killed over 64,000 Palestinians since the war began, and at least 411 people, including 142 children, have died of malnutrition-related causes in that time.
The figures, which cannot be independently verified, do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Israel says it has killed over 22,000 combatants in battle as of August and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught.