GAZA STRIP: Since the October 7 Hamas attack, the health ministry in Gaza Strip says more than 8,000 Palestinians have been martyred by Israel’s relentless bombardments, half of them children. Fighting in Gaza raged for a 23rd day on Sunday, bringing more destruction to the besieged territory.

A Gaza health ministry spokesman said “hundreds” were killed and wounded in “unprecedented” Israeli military action. Israeli forces killed five Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, health officials said, raising to more than 110 the death toll in surging violence there since the start of the Gaza war.

The Palestinian health ministry said five people aged 29 to 35 were shot dead by Israeli forces at dawn, two of them in Nablus’s Askar refugee camp. The other incidents took place in Beit Rima, northwest of Ramallah, Bethlehem’s Dheisheh refugee camp and in Tamun north of Nablus.

More than half of Gaza’s population, some 1.4 million people, have fled their homes so far. The Bedouin village of Wadi al-Seeq in the occupied West Bank had been completely emptied, its 200 residents fleeing on foot with their sheep and goats, due to attacks of Israeli forces.

Hamas said its fighters were engaged in “heavy fighting” with Israeli forces in Gaza after Israeli military deployed more ground forces across the Palestinian territory.

“Our fighters are currently engaged in heavy fighting with machine-guns and anti-tank weapons with the invading occupation (Israeli) forces in northwest Gaza,” the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades said in a statement.

Israeli forces continued to pound north Gaza with air and artillery shelling in the evening. The Israeli army said it had increased its troops inside Gaza overnight and hit “over 450 targets during the past day” after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the war would be “long and difficult”.

Meanwhile, the UN warned that “civil order” in the Gaza Strip was starting to collapse after thousands of people ransacked several of its warehouses and distribution centres, taking wheat, flour and other basic items.

Since the war began, only 84 aid trucks have entered Gaza, compared with a pre-war average of 500 trucks a day, UN figures show.

“The needs of the communities are immense, if only for basic survival, while the aid we receive is meagre and inconsistent,” said Thomas White, the Gaza head of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said that Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza “may force everyone” to act in the latest warning that the conflict could spread across the region.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron spoke by telephone and expressed “their shared concern at the risk of escalation in the wider region”, said a Downing Street spokesperson.

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Israel must distinguish between Hamas militants and civilians in its operations in Gaza. “There is a burden, as I said before and as the president has said, on Israel to take the necessary steps to distinguish between Hamas…, and innocent Palestinian civilians” in Gaza, he added.

Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store called the situation in Gaza “catastrophic”. Speaking on NRK public radio, Store said Israel “has the right to defend against attacks” but its response has been disproportionate and “clearly violates what we call the rules of war or humanitarian law”.

Meanwhile, demonstrations by pro-Palestinians were held in various countries. Waving flags and banners, thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters marched through the streets of Madrid to demand an immediate ceasefire in the deadly war between Israel and Hamas. Around 35,000 people took part according to the central government’s delegation to Madrid, making it one of the biggest rallies in Spain in support of Palestinians.

Also, more than 5,000 people protested in Athens, police said, calling for an end to the “massacre” of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. “We are fighting for the peace of people,” Athens News Agency quoted demonstrators as chanting through loudhailers. “Stop the massacre of the Palestinian people in Gaza,” they shouted.

Separately, thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters poured onto the streets of Brooklyn, New York’s largest district, to voice their anger at Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

Early, there were signs that “internet connectivity is being restored” across Gaza, global network monitor Netblocks said on X, formerly Twitter, some 36 hours after networks and phone access were cut as Israel intensified its bombardment.

Shortly after 4am (0200 GMT), an AFP employee in Gaza had managed to contact people in southern Gaza by phone.