UN aid deliveries to Gaza were suspended again yesterday due to shortages of fuel and a new communications shutdown, deepening the misery of thousands of hungry and homeless Palestinians as Israeli troops battled Hamas in the enclave.

Israeli troops yesterday advanced in their campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza, fighting gun battles and taking control of a key port a day after a raid on the territory’s main hospital.

Israeli soldiers yesterday raided and combed through Gaza's main hospital in an offensive against Hamas, raising fears for thousands of patients and other civilians trapped inside.

Israeli forces, some wearing facemasks and firing guns into the air, raided early yesterday Gaza’s biggest hospital which was packed with thousands of Palestinian patients and displaced people, in the army’s battle against Hamas.

Gaza’s main hospital buried 179 dead patients in a “mass grave”, said the director of the hospital.

Iranian authorities urged young schoolchildren and many civil servants in the capital Tehran to stay at home today due to a spike in air pollution levels.

Israeli tanks took up positions at the gates of Gaza City’s main hospital yesterday, the primary target in their battle to seize control of the northern half of the Gaza Strip, where medics said patients including newborns were dying for lack of fuel.

An internal US State Department dissent memo accused President Joe Biden of “spreading misinformation” about Israel’s war against Hamas, according to Axios.

On foot, by horse-drawn cart and clinging to the sides of overcrowded trucks, Palestinians fled southwards through Gaza to escape Israeli air strikes, telling of their fear, despair and bitter sense of abandonment.

Major hospitals remained cut off yesterday as Israel pressed on with its offensive in north Gaza where doctors said thousands of Palestinians were trapped in dire conditions.

Israeli fighter jets pounded Hezbollah hideouts in southern Lebanon with air strikes yesterday, after an incoming anti-tank missile wounded Israeli civilians near the border, the army said.

Who will govern Gaza when Israel’s military offensive against Hamas ends? After five weeks of fighting, the answer remains shrouded in confusion.

Two premature babies died due to power cuts at Gaza’s largest hospital, Physicians for Human Rights Israel said yesterday, citing doctors there, as fighting rages around the Al-Shifa complex.

Israeli air strikes hit three Gaza hospitals and a school yesterday, killing at least 22 people, and a ground battle was under way at another hospital, Palestinian officials said, as Israel’s forces took on Hamas in the heart of the enclave.

Israeli forces fought Hamas fighters among ruined buildings in the north of the Gaza Strip yesterday, inching their way closer to two big hospitals as the plight of civilians in the besieged Palestinian territory worsened.

Before he fled his home in northern Gaza, where intense fighting now rages between Israel and Hamas, Mahmud al-Masri had a grim job to do: bury his three brothers and their five children in a nearby citrus orchard.

Israel’s widespread and systematic bombardment of housing and civilian infrastructure in Gaza is a war crime, as are the indiscriminate Hamas rocket attacks that hit Israeli dwellings, an independent UN expert said yesterday.

Tahreer Azzam, a nurse at Makassed Hospital in east Jerusalem, has been caring for young, desperately-ill Palestinian patients for 16 years. Since the Israel-Hamas war erupted last month, she now struggles to find them.

Thousands of Palestinian civilians trudged in a forlorn procession out of the north of Gaza yesterday seeking refuge from Israeli air strikes and fierce ground fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas fighters.

Islamic State group attacks killed at least 30 pro-government forces and soldiers in the Syrian desert, a war monitor said Wednesday, in one of the deadliest such assaults this year