Tel Aviv, 4 December 2023 (dpa/MIA) - The expansion of Israeli military operations into the south of the Gaza Strip has prompted renewed calls for Israel to protect Palestinian civilians as it goes after Hamas militants.

 

In a sign of the growing intensity of the fighting, the main telecom company in Gaza said on Monday evening that all phone and internet connections had gone down.

 

The Israeli military had said on Sunday night it was pushing its ground campaign into "all areas" following the resumption of fighting on Friday after a seven-day pause.

 

"The level of human suffering is intolerable," Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said on Monday.

 

"It is unacceptable that civilians have no safe place to go in Gaza, and with a military siege in place there is also no adequate humanitarian response currently possible."

 

Two hospitals in the south of Gaza supported by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) - al-Aqsa Hospital and Nasser Hospital - were barely able to cope with the strain of all the new patients, MSF warned.

 

In the past 48 hours, 100 fatalities and 400 injured people were brought to the emergency room at al-Aqsa Hospital alone, said MSF's Katrien Claeys.

 

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock urged Israel to respect human rights, even as she reiterated Israel's right to self-defence.

 

"The central question is how this right to self-defence is carried out. There is a responsibility to alleviate civilian suffering, especially in this phase," Baerbock said. "Because too many Palestinians have already died."

 

Staunch Israeli allies, UN agencies and aid groups expressed worry about increasing Israeli military strikes on southern Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had sought shelter under Israeli orders earlier in the conflict.

 

"I feel like I am running out of ways to describe the horrors hitting children here. I feel like I am almost failing in my ability to convey the endless killing of children here," James Elder, the spokesman for the UN children's agency UNICEF, said in a video message from a hospital in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.

 

He wrote separately on social media: "Despite what has been assured, attacks in the south of Gaza are every bit as vicious as what the north endured."

 

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that they attacked 200 "terror infrastructure" targets linked to Hamas overnight, as their offensive aimed at completely erasing the militant group from Gaza goes on.

 

Fighting has raged in Gaza for eight weeks, with one seven-day pause to allow for the release of hostages and aid deliveries.

 

Almost 1.9 million people have been displaced across the strip since the war erupted on October 7, reported the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) on Monday. Gaza is home to more than 2.2 million people.

 

Paltel, the main telecommunications provider for Gaza, said on Monday afternoon that landline, mobile and internet services were knocked out in Gaza City and other northern areas of the strip. Hours later, it said its entire network in Gaza was down.

 

Paltel blamed damage to key infrastructure incurred during the war.

 

The war was triggered by the killing of some 1,200 people in southern Israeli communities on October 7. Israel says the massacres committed by Hamas and other militants groups marked the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

 

About 240 people were abducted and taken to Gaza. Israel said on Friday, when the temporary truce ended, that 137 hostages remained there.

 

According to the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry, more than 15,800 people have been killed in Israel's ground and air attacks. More than 42,000 people are missing.

 

The casualty figures cannot currently be independently verified, but the United Nations and other observers point out that the authority's figures have proved to be generally credible in the past.

 

Israeli attacks in Gaza City are said to have left many people dead in two UN-operated schools bow housing internally displaced people.

 

The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that at least 50 people were killed and numerous injured in the al-Daraj quarter of the city following attacks by the air force and artillery.

 

The UNRWA said it could not immediately confirm the WAFA report.

 

Tensions continue to simmer on the Lebanon-Israel border and in the occupied West Bank.

 

Israeli warplanes carried out at least three airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, Lebanese security sources and Israeli army said, after the Iran-backed militants fired more than 20 rockets on posts manned by Israeli border troops.

 

Two Palestinian militants were killed and more than two dozen others arrested in a raid by the Israeli army and police in Qalqilya, in the north-west of the the West Bank.

 

The two people who died were members of the al-Aqsa Brigades, according to the armed group which is close to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party.

 

In addition, according to the Ministry of Health in Ramallah, a 33-year-old man was killed during an army operation in Qalandia, near Ramallah. It was initially unclear whether the dead man was a member of a militant group.