Tel Aviv/Gaza, 4 December 2023 (dpa/MIA) - Israel's military is extending its ground offensive to the entire Gaza Strip, army spokesman Daniel Hagari said on Sunday evening.

The move comes about five weeks after the Israeli army started its ground offensive in the north of the Palestinian coastal enclave.

The soldiers are taking action against targets of the Islamist group Hamas, Hagari said.

Earlier, eyewitnesses had told dpa that Israeli ground troops had advanced into an area east of the city of Khan Yunis in south Gaza.

The army had fought strongly and thoroughly in the northern Gaza Strip and was now doing the same in the southern Gaza Strip, Israel's Chief of General Staff Herzi Halevi had said shortly beforehand - without explicitly talking about a ground offensive.

Israeli ground troops have been deployed in the north since the end of October.

Following instructions from the Israeli military, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled from the embattled north of the sealed-off coastal area to the south - where fighting on the ground is now also likely to intensify.

According to UN estimates, around 80% of the more than 2.2 million inhabitants of the densely populated Gaza Strip have been displaced because of the war.

According to the military, Israel has also been carrying out massive airstrikes in the south since the end of the ceasefire on Friday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said that a ground operation was the only way to destroy Hamas.

In the past 24 hours, Israeli attacks have claimed the lives of over 700 people, according to a Hamas spokesman. There was no independent verification of the statement.

The spokesman said many of the dead were lying under rubble, and that rescue workers were experiencing great difficulty in reaching the injured and taking them to hospital.

Since October 7, Israeli attacks have killed 15,523 people and injured another 41,316, according to the latest figures from Hamas.

According to the statement, 6,600 children and young people are among the dead and another 7,500 people are missing.

The spokesman for the UN Children's Fund, Unicef, James Elder, sharply criticized the Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip during a visit to the region on Sunday.

A "bloodbath" is taking place there which is "immoral" and which "will certainly be understood as illegal," Elder told the news channel Al-Jazeera during a visit to Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

Anyone who accepts this is guilty themselves, he said. "Silence is complicity," said the visibly shaken Elder, who sometimes spoke with a trembling voice.

During his visit, he said, he saw children everywhere with severe burns, injuries from shrapnel, brain injuries and broken bones. Mothers were seen crying for their children, who were probably "hours away from death."

Elder described the latest information about so-called "safe zones" for the population in Gaza as a "misrepresentation". People are being moved to "tiny patches of land" where there is only sand, no water, no sanitary facilities and no protection from the weather.

"These are not safe zones, these will be death zones," said Elder. "We have to call it what it is."

On Saturday, US Vice President Kamala Harris issued a clear warning to Israel. "Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed," she said on the sidelines of the climate conference COP28 in Dubai.

"Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating," Harris continued.

US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin appealed to Israel's "moral responsibility" to protect civilians.

Israeli government adviser Mark Regev, however, rejected allegations that the Israeli military is doing too little to safeguard the civilian population in the Gaza Strip as it combats Hamas.

"We will in parallel make the maximum effort to do two things ­ one to differentiate between the terrorists who are our bitter enemy and the civilian population. We will do everything to safeguard that population," Regev said on Sunday.

Also on Sunday, the IDF said it has uncovered more than 800 tunnel shafts in the Gaza Strip since the start of the recent military operation.

Around 500 of the shafts have been destroyed, with explosives used to wreck several kilometres of tunnel. "Some of the tunnel shafts connected Hamas' strategic assets via the underground tunnel network," the IDF said.

The tunnels were found in residential areas, in certain cases near schools, creches and mosques. Weapons were found in some of them.

Photo: MIA archive