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JERUSALEM — A series of Israeli strikes targeting a senior Hamas commander in the northern Gaza Strip left scores of dead and wounded in a crowded refugee camp Tuesday as Israel expands its assault by air and land. The Gaza Health Ministry and the director of Gaza’s Indonesian hospital said hundreds of people were killed or injured in the attack.
Palestinians carried away the injured and dead on blankets and mattresses in the densely packed Jabalya refugee camp. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said a senior Hamas commander, Ibrahim Biari, was killed in the strikes.
The blasts left a deep crater and crumbled buildings. Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defense emergency services, said about 20 buildings were destroyed. The breakdown of dead and wounded was not immediately clear amid ongoing rescue efforts.
The attack reinforced fears that Israel’s expanded use of airstrikes and larger ground operations will put more civilians in the territory at greater risk and compound an already dire humanitarian crisis.
Aid convoys have kept up a limited delivery of needed supplies, but the deliveries are far short of the growing demands. Egypt has also been preparing hospitals to treat wounded Gazans, but a stalemate in border negotiations has prevented the wounded from crossing. But in a potential breakthrough, Hamas and Egypt said Tuesday that an agreement was reached to allow 81 injured people from Gaza to pass on Wednesday through the Rafah border, the only official route from Gaza not controlled by Israel.
Israel’s push deeper into Gaza has become a test for allies such as the United States, which has stood by Israel’s right to retaliate after a deadly Hamas raid on Oct. 7 but has increasingly pressed for ways to help civilians caught in the war. At a Senate hearing in Washington on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said “humanitarian pauses must be considered.”
The secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, said in a statement that he was “deeply alarmed by the intensification of the conflict.” International humanitarian law, he said, “is not an a la carte menu and cannot be applied selectively.”
Video broadcast by Al Jazeera from Jabalya showed people digging through rubble. It could take days for emergency teams to reach all the victims, Bassal said.
Israel’s near-complete siege of the Gaza Strip has left doctors and medical facilities with dwindling supplies to treat patients as escalating attacks have killed and injured thousands. There are few official details on expanded operations in Gaza, but Israel has said the conflict will be long.
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Gaza’s largest hospital, al-Shifa, warned Tuesday that without fuel deliveries, generators will soon cease to operate and the complex will be plunged into the dark. “After making all the efforts and chasing every drop of fuel to be used in hospitals, we have reached the end of the road,” the director general of the Gaza Health Ministry, Medhat Abbas, said Tuesday.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Wednesday that more than 8,500 people have been killed in the past 25 days, including more than 3,500 children. A statement from UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, called Gaza “a graveyard for thousands of children.”
“It’s a living hell for everyone else,” the statement said.
Israeli officials have not responded to the Hamas claims, but in the past they have dismissed information from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry on civilian deaths as “propaganda.”
The overall objectives of Israel’s intensified assault on Gaza remain shrouded in secrecy. In a press briefing Tuesday, Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said that Israeli troops clashed with Hamas fighters in northern Gaza and that airstrikes targeted the group “in all parts of the Gaza Strip.”
Israel launched a major ground assault on Gaza on Friday. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the expanded operations as the “second phase” of the war to destroy Hamas.
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Hamas’s military arm reported heavy clashes with Israeli ground forces in northern Gaza on Tuesday. The group said an Israeli tank was destroyed in the Zaytoun neighborhood in Gaza City. On the northeastern edge of the strip, it said Hamas fighters attacked ground forces operating with a bulldozer in the village of Beit Hanoun.
Even as Israel’s attacks widen, there are growing calls for a prisoner swap to free the more than 200 hostages held by Hamas. Some families of hostages fear that as the war intensifies, their loved ones will be in greater danger. Israeli officials say military pressure on Hamas will speed efforts to free the hostages.
“No politics, just bring them home,” said Shiri Grosbard, a friend of one of the women shown in a hostage video published by Hamas on Monday. Grosbard said in a video published by Reuters that it was “good news” to see her friend and know that she is alive, but said she felt the government could do more to secure her release.
Israel announced Tuesday that it has identified 240 people who are being held in Gaza. The number has changed “because the identification of people who are not Israeli citizens is complicated,” IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a briefing Tuesday.
In the latest sign of other fronts emerging for Israeli’s military, a missile was intercepted by the “Arrow” missile defense system near the Red Sea in the county’s south. Houthi rebels in Yemen said they launched missiles and drones against Israeli territory Tuesday.
“A surface-to-surface missile was fired toward Israeli territory from the area of the Red Sea,” the IDF said in a statement, the first such use of that defense system since the beginning of the war in Gaza.
In Lebanon, Israeli aircraft struck towns and villages overnight, according to Lebanon’s state news agency. The strikes “destroyed infrastructure” belonging to Hezbollah militants, according to Israeli military spokesman Hagari.
In a visit to the Rafah crossing, Egypt’s prime minister, Mostafa Madbouly, emphasized the country’s strong opposition to any plan by Israel to force Palestinians permanently from Gaza. Egypt would “never allow the settlement of any regional issues at our expense,” he said.
Diaa Rashwan, head of Egypt’s State Information Service, said 250 aid trucks have made it through the crossing since the start of the conflict. He blamed some of the delays on Israel deliberately slowing a process to inspect and verify relief vehicles. Earlier this week, a senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of negotiations, told The Washington Post that Israel had agreed to speed up inspections to enable 100 trucks per day to cross into Gaza. That would be still far below the level of shipments before the war.
Sayid Ibrahim, 17, has volunteered at the Rafah crossing to help pack aid inside trucks headed to Gaza. All of his maternal uncles live in Gaza, he said, as well as his Palestinian grandparents.
“Our hearts everyday weep,” he said. “We can’t sleep.”
Claire Parker in Rafah, Egypt, contributed to this report.