RAFAH, Gaza Strip — The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees warned Wednesday that without immediate deliveries of fuel it will soon have to sharply curtail relief operations across the Gaza Strip, which has been blockaded and devastated by Israeli airstrikes since Hamas militants launched an attack on Israel more than two weeks ago.
The warning came as hospitals in Gaza struggled to treat masses of wounded with dwindling resources. Health officials said the death toll was soaring as Israeli jets pounded the territory overnight into Wednesday.
The Health Ministry in Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, said airstrikes killed more than 750 people over the past 24 hours. Officials did not give a breakdown of how many killed were militants. The Associated Press could not independently verify the death tolls cited by Hamas, which says it tallies figures from hospital directors.
The Israeli military said its strikes killed militants and destroyed tunnels, command centers, weapons storehouses and other military targets. It accuses Hamas of magnifying the suffering of Gazan civilians by hiding among them.
Hamas and other militants have launched unrelenting rocket barrages into Israel since the conflict started.
The rising death toll in Gaza — following a reported 704 killed the day before — was unprecedented in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even greater loss of life could come if Israel launches an expected ground offensive aimed at crushing Hamas militants.
The force of a blast in the southern city of Rafah flipped and crumpled cars and left tattered pieces of clothing hanging in the branches of a tree.
Another strike destroyed a bakery and killed at least 10 people in a refugee camp in Deir al-Balah, the Hamas-run government said. As witnesses described the attack to an AP journalist, a projectile whistled overhead followed by two bangs — another airstrike hit nearby. Men ran through rubble-strewn streets carrying the injured.
In the wreckage of about 15 homes in Khan Younis, a backhoe peeled away layers of broken concrete tangled with rebar where a home once stood. A worker in an orange vest waded into the rubble and lifted a dead baby from the ruins. He wrapped the infant in a blanket. A teddy bear lay in the rubble nearby.
The U.N. says about 1.4 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are now internally displaced, with nearly half of them crowded into U.N. shelters.
Gaza’s residents have been running out of food, water and medicine since Israel sealed off the territory following the attack on southern Israel by Hamas, which is sworn to Israel’s destruction.
In recent days, Israel allowed a small number of trucks filled with aid to come over the border with Egypt but barred deliveries of fuel — needed to power hospital generators — to keep it out of Hamas’ hands.
The U.N. said it had managed to deliver some of the aid in recent days to hospitals treating the wounded. But the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, the largest provider of humanitarian services in Gaza, said it was running out of fuel.
Officials said they were forced to reduce their operations as they rationed what little fuel they had.
More than half of Gaza’s primary healthcare facilities, and roughly a third of its hospitals, have stopped functioning, the World Health Organization said.
Overwhelmed hospital staff struggled to triage cases as constant waves of wounded were brought in. The Health Ministry said many wounded are laid on the ground without even simple medical aid and others wait for days for surgeries because there are so many critical cases.
The conflict threatened to spread across the region, as Israeli airstrikes hit Syrian military sites in the south Wednesday, killing eight soldiers and wounding seven, according to Syria’s state-run SANA news agency.
The Israeli military said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, its jets had struck Syrian military infrastructure and mortar systems in response to rocket launches from Syria.
One airstrike Wednesday hit the international airport in the city of Aleppo, damaging its runway and putting it out of service, Syrian media reported, the fourth attack on the airport since the fighting began.
Israel has also hit the Damascus airport, in an apparent attempt to prevent arms shipments from Iran to militant groups, including Hezbollah, which operates in Lebanon. Israel has been fighting the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah across the Lebanese border in recent weeks.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah met Wednesday with top Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials in their first reported meeting since the war started. Such a meeting could signal coordination between the groups, as Hezbollah officials warned Israel against launching a ground offensive in Gaza.
Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Iran was helping Hamas, with intelligence and by “whipping up incitement against Israel across the world.” He said Iranian proxies were also operating against Israel from Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon.
The Gaza Health Ministry says more than 6,500 Palestinians have been killed in the war. The figure includes the disputed toll from an explosion at a hospital last week.
The fighting has killed more than 1,400 people in Israel — mostly civilians slain during the initial Hamas attack, according to the Israeli government. Hamas is also holding some 222 people that it captured and brought back to Gaza.
On Wednesday, Hamas said it launched a rocket toward the southern Israeli city of Eilat, 200 kilometers (125 miles) away. The Israeli miltary said the rocket landed in an open field.
The prime minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, whose country has helped mediate the release of four hostages held in Gaza, said more breakthroughs were possible, “hopefully soon.”
Fighting also erupted in the West Bank where Islamic Jihad militants said they fought with Israeli forces in Jenin overnight. The Palestinian Health Ministry in the West Bank said Israel killed four Palestinians in Jenin, including a 15-year-old, and two others in other towns. That brought the total number of those killed in the occupied West Bank since Oct. 7 to 102.
On Wednesday, Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, said his country will stop issuing visas to U.N. personnel after U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that Hamas’ attack “did not happen in a vacuum.” It was unclear what the action, if followed through with, would mean for U.N. aid personnel working in Gaza and the West Bank.
“It’s time to teach them a lesson,” Erdan told Army Radio, accusing the U.N. chief of justifying a slaughter.
The U.N. chief told the Security Council on Tuesday that “the Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” Guterres also said “the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
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Magdy reported from Cairo and Nessman from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Wafaa Shurafa in Deir al-Balah; Gaza Strip; Aamer Madhani in Washington; Amy Teibel in Jerusalem; and Brian Melley in London contributed to this report.
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Find more of AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war
