Fighting between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants in northern Gaza caused another 200,000 people to flee south in the past 10 days, the U.N. humanitarian office said Tuesday.
The humanitarian office, known as OCHA, said only one hospital in the north is capable of treating patients. Some of the fighting is around hospitals where patients, newborns and medics are stranded with no electricity and dwindling supplies. Israel accuses Hamas of using hospitals as cover for its fighters, alleging that Hamas has set up its main command center in and beneath Shifa hospital, the largest in the besieged territory. Both Hamas and Shifa hospital staff deny the Israeli allegations.
The southern part of Gaza is not much safer. Israel carries out frequent airstrikes against what it says are militant targets that often kill women and children.
More than two-thirds of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have fled their homes since the war began.
Gaza City, the largest urban area in the territory, is the focus of Israel’s campaign to crush Hamas following the militant group’s deadly Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel that set off the war.
More than 11,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and minors, have been killed since the war began, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilian and militant deaths. About 2,700 people have been reported missing.
More than 1,200 people in Israel died, most of them in the Hamas attack, and about 240 hostages were taken from Israel into Gaza by Palestinian militants.
Currently:
— Thousands flee Gaza’s main hospital but hundreds, including babies, still trapped by fighting
— Is Hamas hiding in Gaza’s main hospital? Israel’s claim is now a focal point in a dayslong stalemate
— EU nations condemn Hamas for what they describe as use of hospitals, civilians as ‘human shields’
— Biden’s initial confidence on Israel gives way to the complexities and casualties of a brutal war