Israeli tanks have pushed deeper into districts in central and southern Gaza overnight under heavy air and artillery fire, residents say, pressing a deadly offensive that has razed much of the enclave and that Israel has said could last months more.
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Fighting late on Friday and early Saturday was focused in al-Bureij, Nuseirat and Khan Younis, backed by intensive air strikes that filled hospitals with injured Palestinians.
The bombardment has killed 100 Palestinians and injured 150 in the central Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, a senior health official in central Gaza said.
At Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the biggest and most important medical facility in the south of the tiny, crowded enclave, Red Crescent images posted online showed ambulances operating amid smashed streets, carrying injured children.
Almost all of Gaza's 2.3 million residents have been forced from their homes by Israel's withering 12-week assault, triggered by the Hamas attack on October 7 that killed 1200 people and brought 240 hostages into the group's grasp.
The offensive has killed at least 21,500 Palestinians, according to health authorities in Hamas-run Gaza, and the conflict risks spreading across the region, drawing in Iran-aligned groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Bombardment has smashed houses, apartment blocks and businesses and put hospitals out of action.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said on Friday troops were reaching Hamas command centres and arms depots and pictures the military released showed soldiers moving across churned-up earth among ruins of destroyed buildings.
The Israeli military said it had destroyed a tunnel complex in the basement of one of the houses of the Hamas leader for Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, in Gaza City.
The US has called for Israel to scale down the war and move to targeted operations against Hamas leaders.
On Friday US Secretary of State Antony Blinken approved the sale of more artillery shells and other equipment to Israel without congressional review, the Pentagon said.
Israel said on Friday it had facilitated the entry of vaccines into Gaza in co-ordination with UNICEF, the United Nations children's agency, to help prevent the spread of disease.
The little aid reaching the enclave since the start of the war, when Israel imposed a near-total blockade on all food, medicine and fuel, has come across the border with Egypt.
Israel has only allowed access to the south of the enclave, where it started ordering all Gaza civilians to move from October, and aid agencies have said Israeli inspections have stopped all but a small fraction of needed supplies getting in.
An Israeli government spokesman said on Friday it does not limit humanitarian aid and the problem was with its distribution inside Gaza.
Al-Bureij, Nuseirat and Khan Younis are three out of eight Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza that usually receive services from the UN Relief and Works Agency.
The agency cares for Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes during Israel's creation in 1948 and live in slum-like camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
South Africa asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Friday for an urgent order declaring that Israel was in breach of its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention in its crackdown against Hamas in Gaza.
It called on the court to issue short-term measures ordering Israel to stop its military campaign "to protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people".
No date has been set for a hearing.
In response, Israel's foreign ministry blamed Hamas for the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza by using them as human shields and stealing humanitarian aid from them.
Hamas denies such accusations.
A Palestinian journalist working for Al-Quds TV was killed along with some of his family members in an air strike on their house in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza Strip on Friday, health officials and fellow journalists said.
Gaza's government media office says 106 Palestinian journalists have been killed in the Israeli offensive.
Most of the journalists and media workers killed in the war were Palestinian.
Australian Associated Press
