RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel's war to destroy Hamas has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians, health officials in Gaza said Friday, as Israel expanded its offensive and ordered tens of thousands more people to leave their homes.
Deaths in Gaza amount to nearly 1% of the territory's pre-war population – the latest indication of the huge toll the 11-week conflict has claimed.
Israel's air and ground offensive was one of the most devastating military campaigns in modern history, displacing nearly 85% of Gaza's 2.3 million residents and leveling large swaths of the tiny coastal enclave. More than half a million people in Gaza – a quarter of the population – are starving, according to a report from the United Nations and other organizations on Thursday.
Israel declared war after Hamas militants crossed the border on October 7, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostages. Israel has vowed to continue the fight until Hamas is destroyed and removed from power in Gaza and all hostages are freed.
After many delays, the UN Security Council adopted a watered-down resolution on Friday calling for an immediate acceleration of aid deliveries to desperate civilians in Gaza.
The United States has won the lifting of a tougher demand for an “urgent cessation of hostilities” between Israel and Hamas. It abstained from the vote, as did Russia, which wanted stricter language. The war resolution was the first to make it through the council after the US vetoed two previous resolutions calling for humanitarian pauses and a full ceasefire.
Israel promises to maintain pressure on Hamas
The U.S. also negotiated the removal of language that would have given the United Nations the authority to review aid entering the Gaza Strip, which Israel says it must do to ensure the material does not reach Hamas.
Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, thanked the United States for its support and strongly criticized the United Nations for failing to condemn the October 7 Hamas attacks. The United States vetoed a resolution in October that would have condemned Israel because it did not also emphasize Israel's right to self-defense.
Hamas said in a statement that the U.N. resolution should have called for an immediate halt to the Israeli offensive and accused the United States of pushing to “empty the resolution of its essence” ahead of Friday's Security Council vote.
Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reiterated his long-standing call for a humanitarian ceasefire.
Guterres said nothing could justify Hamas' Oct. 7 attacks, its hostage-taking, its rocket attacks against Israel and what he called its use of civilians as human shields.
“But at the same time, these violations of international humanitarian law can never justify collective punishment of the Palestinian people and do not relieve Israel of its own legal obligations under international law,” the Secretary-General said.
Israel, protected by the United States, has resisted international pressure to scale back its offensive. The military has said months of fighting lies ahead in southern Gaza, an area that is home to the vast majority of the enclave's 2.3 million people, many of whom were ordered to flee fighting in the north early in the war .
Evacuation orders have pushed displaced civilians into ever-smaller areas in the south as troops concentrate on Khan Younis, Gaza's second-largest city.
The military announced late Thursday that it was deploying more ground troops, including combat engineers, to Khan Younis to attack Hamas militants above ground and in tunnels.
On Friday, it ordered tens of thousands of residents to leave their homes in Burej, an urban refugee camp, and surrounding communities in central Gaza, suggesting a ground attack there could be next.
An airstrike on a house killed six people in the town of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, according to Associated Press journalists who saw the bodies at a hospital. Among the dead were a couple and their four-month-old child, said the infant's grandfather, Anwar Dhair.
Rafah is one of the few places in Gaza where there is no evacuation order, but is under almost daily Israeli attacks.
The air and ground campaign continued in the north, where Israel says it is in the final stages of driving out Hamas militants.
Mustafa Abu Taha, a Palestinian farmworker, said many areas of his hard-hit Shijaiyah neighborhood in Gaza City had become inaccessible due to massive destruction from airstrikes.
“They hit anything that moves,” he said of the Israeli forces.
Rising death toll and hunger
Gaza's Health Ministry said Friday it had documented 20,057 dead in the fighting and more than 50,000 wounded. No distinction is made between combatant and civilian deaths. It was previously said that around two thirds of the dead were women or minors.
Israel blames Hamas for the high civilian death toll, citing the group's use of crowded residential areas for military purposes and its tunnels under urban areas.
According to the Israeli military, 139 of its soldiers were killed in the ground offensive. It said it had killed thousands of Hamas militants, including about 2,000 in the last three weeks, but no evidence was provided to back up that claim.
Throughout most of the war, Israel also halted imports of food, water, fuel and other aid, except for convoys of trucks carrying aid from Egypt, which meet only a fraction of Gaza's needs.
Due to insufficient aid flows to Gaza, the scale of the famine has dwarfed the near-famines of recent years in Afghanistan and Yemen, and the risk of famine is increasing every day, the U.N. report said Thursday.
An Israeli military liaison officer said there was no food shortage in Gaza and said sufficient aid was arriving.
“The reserves in the Gaza Strip are sufficient in the short term,” said Colonel Moshe Tetro of the Kerem Shalom cargo crossing, without elaborating.
Israel opened the Kerem Shalom border crossing a few days ago due to international calls to increase the flow of aid. But the military attacked the Palestinian side of the border crossing on Thursday, killing four staff members. The UN said it was unable to pick up aid there for delivery. It was not immediately known whether the UN resumed work there on Friday. The Israeli military said it was targeting militants.
The war between Israel and Hamas has also caused the health sector in Gaza to collapse.
According to the World Health Organization, only nine of the 36 health facilities are still partially operational, all located in the south.
The agency reported an increase in disease rates in Gaza, including a five-fold increase in diarrheal illnesses and an increase in meningitis, skin rashes and scabies.
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Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.