Israel bombards Gaza as world leaders call for pause in conflict to let aid in

The latest:

• Israel continues striking Gaza; military says it destroyed some Hamas tunnels.
• Fighting also reported in West Bank and near Syria, Lebanon borders.
• Western nations call for humanitarian pause to strikes in Gaza.
• Hospitals, shelters ‘overwhelmed’ in Gaza.
• Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad officials meet, pledge to co-operate.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned Wednesday that without immediate deliveries of fuel it will soon have to sharply cut back relief operations across the Gaza Strip, which has been blockaded and hit by devastating Israeli airstrikes since Hamas militants launched an attack on Israel more than two weeks ago.

The warning came as hospitals in Gaza struggled to treat masses of wounded with dwindling resources, and health officials in the Hamas-ruled territory said the death toll was soaring as Israeli jets continued striking the territory overnight into Wednesday.

The Israeli military said its strikes had killed militants and destroyed tunnels, command centres, weapons storehouses and other military targets, which it has accused Hamas of hiding among Gaza’s civilian population. Gaza-based militants have been launching unrelenting rocket barrages into Israel since the current conflict started.

Israel’s military also said it targeted a cell of Hamas divers attempting to enter Israel by sea near Kibbutz Zikim. There was no immediate comment from Hamas on the incident.

How Hamas uses its labyrinth of tunnels in Gaza

Hamas uses an elaborate network of tunnels for everything from storage to staging attacks, and they pose a big challenge for Israel. CBC’s Ellen Mauro breaks down how the tunnels change the war and make things more dangerous for the Israeli military and the Palestinians who live above them.

Israel said Tuesday it had launched 400 airstrikes over the past day, an increase from the 320 strikes the day before.

The fighting has killed more than 1,400 people in Israel — mostly civilians slain during the initial Hamas attack on Oct. 7, including several Canadians. Hamas is also holding over 200 people that it captured and brought back to Gaza, with four hostages released so far.

Qatari mediators are urging Hamas to quicken the pace of hostage releases to include women and children and to do so without expecting Israeli concessions, said three diplomats and a source in the region familiar with the talks.

The Gulf state, in co-ordination with the U.S., is leading mediation talks with Hamas and Israel over the hostage release.

Calls for humanitarian pause

At the United Nations, the United States and Russia put forward rival plans on humanitarian aid for Palestinian civilians. Washington has called for pauses in the fighting and Russia wants a humanitarian ceasefire. A pause, which the Canadian government backs, is generally considered less formal and shorter than a ceasefire.

Arab states firmly back a call for a humanitarian ceasefire amid widespread destruction in Gaza.

Across central and south Gaza, where Israel told civilians to take shelter, there were multiple scenes of rescuers pulling the dead and wounded out of large piles of rubble from collapsed buildings. Graphic photos and video shot by the Associated Press showed rescuers unearthing bodies of children from multiple ruins.

At a mosque in Deir Al-Balah, workers prayed over 24 dead wrapped in body bags, several of them the size of small children. Buildings that collapsed on residents killed dozens at a time in several cases, witnesses said.

The UN says about 1.4 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are now internally displaced, with almost 600,000 crowded into UN shelters.

Gaza’s residents have been running out of food, water and medicine since Israel sealed off the territory following the attack on southern Israel by Hamas, which is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

In recent days, Israel allowed a small number of trucks filled with aid to come over the border with Egypt but barred deliveries of fuel — needed to power hospital generators — to keep it out of Hamas’s hands.

The UN said it had managed to deliver some of the aid in recent days to hospitals treating the wounded. But the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, the largest provider of humanitarian services there, said it would run out of fuel by Wednesday night.

Israeli troops await orders along the Gaza border

Thousands of Israeli soldiers are awaiting their orders along the border with Gaza in preparation for a possible ground offensive as world leaders reportedly continued to visit Israel in private to urge the government to delay moving into Gaza.

Officials said they were forced to reduce their operations as they rationed what little fuel they had.

“Without fuel our trucks cannot go around to further places in the strip for distribution,” said Lily Esposito, a spokesperson for the agency. “We will have to make decisions on what activities we keep or not with little fuel.”

“Our shelters are four times over their capacities — many people are sleeping in the streets as current facilities are overwhelmed,” UNRWA posted on X.

Meanwhile, more than half of Gaza’s primary health-care facilities, and roughly a third of its hospitals, have stopped functioning, the World Health Organization said.

Overwhelmed hospital staff struggled to triage cases as constant waves of wounded were brought in.

The Health Ministry in Gaza says more than 6,546 Palestinians have been killed in the war. The figure includes the disputed toll from an explosion at a hospital last week. The Associated Press could not independently verify the death tolls cited by Hamas, which says it tallies figures from hospital directors.

Hezbollah, Hamas leaders meet

The conflict threatened to spread across the region, as Israeli airstrikes hit Syrian military sites in the south Wednesday, killing eight soldiers and wounding seven, according to Syria’s state-run SANA news agency.

The Israeli military said in a social media post that its jets had struck Syrian military infrastructure and mortar systems in response to rocket launches from Syria. Israel has launched several strikes on Syria in recent days, in an apparent attempt to prevent arms shipments from Iran to militant groups, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Israel has been fighting the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah across the Lebanese border in recent weeks. Hezbollah said Wednesday that two more of its fighters had been killed, increasing the death toll in its ranks to 40 fighters since the start of the conflict.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah met with top Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials and discussed what their alliance must do to “achieve a real victory for the resistance and to halt the brutal aggression,” Hezbollah said on Wednesday.

“There was agreement on continuing the co-ordination,” Hezbollah said.

Fighting also erupted in the West Bank, which has seen a major spike in violence. Islamic Jihad militants said they fought with Israeli forces in Jenin overnight. The Palestinian Health Ministry in the West Bank said Israel killed three Palestinians in Jenin and two others in other towns, bringing the total number of those killed in the occupied West Bank since Oct. 7 to 101.