JERUSALEM (AFP) – Israel bombed Gaza on Saturday as the United Nations warned the Palestinian territory has become “uninhabitable” after three months of fighting that threatens to engulf the wider region.
AFP correspondents reported Israeli strikes early Saturday on Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of people have sought shelter from the fighting.
Civilians continue to bear the brunt of the conflict, with the UN warning of a deepening humanitarian crisis as famine looms and disease spreads.
Abu Mohammed, 60, who fled to Rafah from the central Bureij refugee camp, told AFP Gaza’s future was “dark and gloomy and very difficult”.
With much of the territory already reduced to rubble, UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said on Friday that “Gaza has simply become uninhabitable”.
The UN’s children’s agency warned that clashes, malnutrition and a lack of health services had created “a deadly cycle that threatens over 1.1 million children” in Gaza.
Israeli forces were continuing “to fight in all parts of the Gaza Strip, in the north, centre and south”, military spokesman Daniel Hagari said late Friday.
Hagari said Israeli forces were maintaining a “very high state of readiness” near the border with Lebanon following the killing of a top Hamas commander in a strike in Beirut.
Israel has not claimed responsibility for the strike but a US defence official told AFP that Israel carried it out.
Israel has launched a relentless bombardment and ground invasion since Oct 7 that has killed at least 22,600 people, most of them women and children, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Top Western diplomats were in the region on a fresh push to raise the flow of aid into the besieged territory and calm rising tensions.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Turkey on Saturday where he was due to discuss the Gaza war with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Blinken will also visit several Arab states before heading to Israel and the occupied West Bank next week.
During his visit, Blinken plans to discuss with Israeli leaders “immediate measures to increase substantially humanitarian assistance to Gaza”, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
The EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell travelled to Lebanon on Friday for talks on “all aspects of the situation in and around Gaza”, including escalating tensions with Israel.
A foreign ministry spokesman said that Germany’s top diplomat Annalena Baerbock was also due to travel to the region.
She plans to discuss “the dramatic humanitarian situation in Gaza” and tensions on the Israel-Lebanon border, spokesman Sebastian Fischer said.
The war in Gaza and almost daily exchanges of cross-border fire between Israel and Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group since October 7 have raised fears of a wider conflagration.
Those fears grew this week following the killing of Hamas deputy leader Saleh al-Aruri in Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned Israel on Friday that the group would swiftly respond “on the battlefield” to Aruri’s death.
Israel’s military said on Friday that its fighter jets had conducted fresh strikes against Hezbollah targets just across the border.