Israeli airstrikes kill scores of Palestinians across Gaza

• Israeli airstrikes kill scores at a school in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza.
• President Biden said Saturday the Palestinian Authority should ultimately govern the Gaza Strip and the West Bank following the Israel-Hamas war.
• Israel is widening its war against Hamas in southern Gaza.
• Israel denies reports that it ordered evacuation of Shifa Hospital. Says it had talked with Shifa Hospital director about providing a secure route out of the hospital for those who wanted to evacuate.
• Palestinian telecommunications company partially restores phone and internet services in Gaza after fuel shipments arrive.

Dozens of displaced civilians were killed or wounded Saturday in Israeli airstrikes, including one on a school in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees reported.

"The scenes were horrifying. Corpses of women and children were on the ground. Others were screaming for help," wounded survivor Ahmed Radwan told The Associated Press by phone of Israel’s attack on the camp’s Fakhoura school.

AP photos from a local hospital showed more than 20 bodies wrapped in bloodstained sheets.

"These attacks cannot become commonplace, they must stop. A humanitarian cease-fire cannot wait any longer," UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini posted Saturday morning on the social media platform X.

In response, the Israeli military said only that its troops were active in the Jabaliya area "with the aim of hitting terrorists" while trying to minimize civilian harm.

On Saturday, the military warned civilians in parts of southern Gaza to leave. On Friday, Israel had issued new warnings for Palestinians in the southern city of Khan Younis to relocate from areas of the Gaza Strip where Israeli officials earlier had told people it was safe.

"We're asking people to relocate," Mark Regev, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told MSNBC. "I know it's not easy for many of them, but we don't want to see civilians caught up in the crossfire."

On Saturday, Israeli airstrikes killed at least 47 people in Khan Younis and the vicinity, medics said.

One airstrike hit two apartment buildings in Khan Younis, killing 26 Palestinians and wounding 23, health officials said. Six more were killed a few kilometers north when a house in the town of Deir Al-Balah was bombed, health officials said.

Fifteen Palestinians died Saturday afternoon in a house west of Khan Younis near a shelter for displaced people, medics and witnesses said.

The World Health Organization led a joint U.N. humanitarian mission on Saturday to Shifa Hospital.

The team, which was able to spend an hour at the hospital, said what was "once the largest, most advanced, and best equipped hospital in Gaza" was now a "death zone."

Twenty-five health workers remained to care for 291 patients, which included 32 infants in "extremely critical condition, two people in intensive care without ventilation and 22 dialysis patients." Most of the patients had severe injuries, the WHO said in a statement.

WHO said it was working to evacuate the remaining patients and health workers in the next one to three days to Nasser Medical Complex and European Gaza Hospital in southern Gaza.

Most of the patients, staff and displaced people had left Shifa earlier Saturday in what a witness described a panicked and chaotic evacuation as Israeli forces searched and face-scanned men among the evacuees, the AP reported.

"We left at gunpoint," Mahmoud Abu Auf told AP by phone. "Tanks and snipers were everywhere inside and outside." He said he saw Israeli forces detain three men.

Israel’s military has been searching Shifa Hospital for traces of a Hamas command center that it alleges was located under the building — a claim Hamas and the hospital staff deny.

The evacuation, which Israel says was voluntary, left behind only Israeli forces and the few health workers to care for the nearly 300 patients too sick to move.

Internet and phone service was restored to the Gaza Strip on Saturday, ending a telecommunications outage the Palestinian telecommunications company Paltel said. The outage had forced the United Nations to shut down critical aid deliveries.

Palestinian authorities in Gaza now say more than 12,000 people — about 5,000 of them children — have been killed since Israel launched a major air and ground offensive in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack that killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel. Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., U.K, EU and others.

The United Nations deems those figures credible, though they have not been updated since Nov. 10 because of the collapse of services and communications at hospitals in northern Gaza.

Israel said 57 of its soldiers had been killed in Gaza since it entered the territory.

Source: VOA