At least 49 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza, medical sources say, as the Israeli military has sent tanks into areas of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza for the first time since Israel began its assault on the besieged territory in October 2023.
Israel on Monday launched the ground offensive on southern and eastern areas of the city that is packed with displaced Palestinians, a day after its military issued a forced displacement order for residents in the areas, forcing thousands of people to flee west towards the Mediterranean coast and south to Khan Younis.
Tank shelling in the area hit houses and mosques, killing at least three Palestinians and wounding several, the Reuters news agency reported, quoting local medics.
Reporting from Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said gunfire was audible as Israeli tanks rolled into the area on Monday morning.
“We can see that the entire city is under Israeli attack,” he said. “We did not manage to sleep last night.”
“There has been an ongoing Israeli bombardment. Israeli jets, tanks and naval gunboats continue to strike multiple residential areas. Three more squares were destroyed in the city, and then residential houses were flattened.”
He said many Deir el-Balah residents fled using donkey carts and other modes of transport.
Israel intensifies attacks
In Khan Younis in southern Gaza, an Israeli air strike killed at least five people, including a husband and wife and their two children, in a tent, medics said.
Among those reported killed since dawn on Monday were four aid seekers waiting for food near a distribution centre operated by the United States- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Five other Palestinians were killed in a separate Israeli bombardment in Jabalia al-Balad in the north.
Earlier, the Palestine Red Crescent Society reported that its teams had recovered the body of one person and evacuated three wounded after an Israeli artillery strike on the nearby Jabalia al-Nazla area.
Drone strikes were reported in Gaza City, resulting in casualties, a source at al-Shifa Hospital told Al Jazeera Arabic.
The previous day, at least 134 people were killed and 1,155 injured by Israeli forces, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. At least 59,029 people in Gaza have been killed since the war began.
On Sunday, Gaza health authorities reported at least 19 people had starved to death in one day, highlighting the desperate situation under the Israeli aid blockade.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, the World Food Programme’s Palestine representative, Antoine Renard, said the United Nations agency has warned for “weeks” that Palestinians in Gaza are facing starvation.
“You have a level of despair that people are ready to risk their lives just to reach any of the assistance actually coming into Gaza,” Renard said from occupied East Jerusalem.
“[There’s a] soaring number of people facing malnutrition, and we can really see that the situation is really getting to levels that we’ve never seen ever before.”
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said it is receiving “desperate messages of starvation” from inside Gaza, including from its staff, as humanitarian conditions continue to deteriorate.
“The suffering in Gaza is manmade and must be stopped. Lift the siege and let aid in safely and at scale,” UNRWA said in a statement posted on X.
Amjad Shawa, head of the Palestinian NGO Network, told Al Jazeera on Monday that 900,000 children are experiencing varying degrees of malnutrition in Gaza.
Twenty-five countries, including the United Kingdom, France and other European nations, issued a joint statement saying the war in Gaza “must end now” and Israel must comply with international law.
The foreign ministers of the 25 countries, including Australia, Canada and Japan, said “the suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths”, and they condemned “the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food”.
“The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity,” the statement said.
“The Israeli government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable. Israel must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law,” it said.