Two premature babies died due to power cuts at Gaza’s largest hospital, Physicians for Human Rights Israel said yesterday, citing doctors there, as fighting rages around the Al-Shifa complex.

Israeli air strikes hit three Gaza hospitals and a school yesterday, killing at least 22 people, and a ground battle was under way at another hospital, Palestinian officials said, as Israel’s forces took on Hamas in the heart of the enclave.

Israeli forces fought Hamas fighters among ruined buildings in the north of the Gaza Strip yesterday, inching their way closer to two big hospitals as the plight of civilians in the besieged Palestinian territory worsened.

Before he fled his home in northern Gaza, where intense fighting now rages between Israel and Hamas, Mahmud al-Masri had a grim job to do: bury his three brothers and their five children in a nearby citrus orchard.

Israel’s widespread and systematic bombardment of housing and civilian infrastructure in Gaza is a war crime, as are the indiscriminate Hamas rocket attacks that hit Israeli dwellings, an independent UN expert said yesterday.

Tahreer Azzam, a nurse at Makassed Hospital in east Jerusalem, has been caring for young, desperately-ill Palestinian patients for 16 years. Since the Israel-Hamas war erupted last month, she now struggles to find them.

Thousands of Palestinian civilians trudged in a forlorn procession out of the north of Gaza yesterday seeking refuge from Israeli air strikes and fierce ground fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas fighters.

Islamic State group attacks killed at least 30 pro-government forces and soldiers in the Syrian desert, a war monitor said Wednesday, in one of the deadliest such assaults this year

Imprisoned Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi began a hunger strike on Monday in protest against what she said was the jail’s failure to give her access to medical care, the activist HRANA news agency reported.

One month into the Israel-Hamas war, the achievements of US-led diplomacy have been small or subtle, but both supporters and critics say that is partly by design.

Israel gave civilians still trapped inside freshly encircled Gaza City a four-hour window to leave yesterday and escaping residents said they passed tanks in position to storm it.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres yesterday said the protection of civilians “must be paramount” in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, warning that the Gaza Strip was becoming “a graveyard for children.”

Efforts were underway yesterday to resume evacuations of injured Gazans and foreign nationals through the Rafah crossing to Egypt, suspended since Saturday after a deadly attack on an ambulance, Egyptian, US and Qatari officials said.

World Food Programme (WFP) head Cindy McCain said yesterday that the aid currently entering Gaza is “nowhere near” enough to meet the needs of people there, which she added were growing exponentially.

Palestinians reported a deadly Israeli air strike on a UN-run school in northern Gaza serving as a shelter yesterday as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met regional Arab leaders to discuss how to contain the conflict.

The UN human rights chief yesterday denounced the “sharp rise in hatred globally” since the war between Hamas and Israel began on October 7.

The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah yesterday warned the United States that if Israel did not stop its assault on Gaza then fighting on the Lebanese front could turn into a wider war.

Israel’s military said yesterday its forces have surrounded the Hamas stronghold of Gaza City after a day that saw the Palestinian territory pounded by deadly fire.

The United Nations will remain steadfast in supporting Palestinians in Gaza, a top aid official said during the first such trip to the territory since the war with Israel erupted.

Israel yesterday gain hit Gaza’s biggest refugee camp for a second consecutive day killing dozens as the first batch of injured Palestinians and foreigners escaped the besieged territory to Egypt.